THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL 66 | MAY 2025 From the OBA MAP Director By Jim Calloway A Few Final Words From Your Practice Management Advisor IN THE SUMMER OF 1997, when I first reported for work at the OBA to develop a program to assist practicing lawyers, I certainly didn’t anticipate I would be retiring from the OBA 28 years later. But here we are. I’ll be retiring at the end of May. Retirement brings mixed emotions – from the sadness of moving on to the happy anticipation of what’s next. But primarily, I feel gratitude. The relationships I have developed with so many lawyers have been rewarding, and one of the best things was rarely having to argue with other members of the bar. Since this is my last “Law Practice Tips” column, I do promise to end with some tips. I appreciate that OBA leadership trusted me to try many ideas over the years. After I had shut down my law practice and started in this position, I learned the task force that created the program had some not just unrealistic, but impossible expectations. One was that within a few years, the program would be generating so much consulting revenue that it would largely pay for itself. I sought an audience with thenOBA Executive Director Marvin Emerson and shared my view that many Oklahoma lawyers didn’t really want the OBA in their offices. Even fewer would be willing to pay for the privilege – at least at that time. Mr. Emerson was a legend with a legendary sternness. But he actually chuckled in response, saying, “You are probably right about that.” So I designed a “mostly free” member benefit program, writing an article in every bar journal, speaking at no charge to any county bar association or Oklahoma lawyer group that invited me, starting a hotline service to answer lawyers’ questions about law office management and technology and many other projects. I had few objective qualifications for this job. Before the widespread use of the internet, I established a computer bulletin board system named the “Barrister’s Club” as a hobby. Lawyers calling in from other area codes would wait until after 11 p.m. to log in when the long-distance telephone rates were lower. Those on the interviewing committee likely thought that required more technical expertise than it did. My other “qualification” was that I had been invited to become one of the OBA Family Law Section’s “computer nerds.” The late Doug Loudenback, the late Gary Dean and Charles Hogshead invited me to participate with them in their CLEs. It was at a Family Law Section CLE that I gave one of the first live demonstrations for lawyers, showing how to log in to the internet using a 1,200-baud acoustic modem we dropped a telephone handset into and the Mozilla browser. It was all text and no graphics, with mainly .edu and .gov domains and not much else. Because of the time spent in my youth reading science fiction, I was able to make some accurate predictions on what was ahead for the internet. Many will remember that Doug Loudenback created the Grande Macros, a collection of interlocking WordPerfect macros that would draft most routine family law pleadings. Doug wasn’t much of a marketer, so we agreed that my department would sell them for him on a commission basis. It is interesting that, while some software tools for lawyers still struggle with perfecting automated document assembly, many Oklahoma family law lawyers had that capability decades ago, even though the macros have now faded into history. MANDATORY CLE DOESN’T NEED TO BE BORING Many lawyers today do not know that the requirements for MCLE and ethics programs arose from a reaction to the Watergate scandal, involving many lawyers behaving questionably or illegally.
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