I am sure everyone has been wondering what juicy tidbits were revealed at the ABA Midyear Meeting, and when I might be reporting them. Well, colleagues, you need wait no longer.
Let's begin with the Treasurer's Report. As you may recall from the Annual Meeting last year, ABA was forecasting a surplus for the year, but recognized the possibility a pension liability adjustment might have considerable impact. With the audited results now in, ABA's pension liability had increased by $16.6 Million. The liability has two components, which are the $43 Million in unfunded liabilities and $30 Million representing the balance of a loan ABA took out to contribute to the plan, for a total pension-related liability of $73 Million. Indeed ABA can still claim a $1.3 Million "operating surplus" for 2019, but on a consolidated basis, realized a $700,000 deficit. Its net change in assets for 2019 was a negative $28.1 Million on a consolidated basis.
For 2020, year to date, revenues were short through December. The Treasurer also discloses that some membership dues revenue will straddle fiscal years now, because members will have individual renewal dates based on when they joined, rather than sharing a standard membership year as in the past. One effect that this will have (not discussed in the Treasurer's Report) will be to help cloud the effectiveness (vel non) of the "new membership model." The video is here (and the "pause" feature can be used to freeze slides for in-depth study):
https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2020/02/midyear-meeting-2020--aba-treasurer-delivers-financial-report-to/
What about that "new membership model"? Well, it was covered in greater depth in the Executive Director's Report. I think they like to do these on the last day of the meeting, so Delegates will go home to sober up before they have much time to really think about what they are being told. Here are some of the highlights:
20% of ABA Staff are now working on immigration issues. Where 72% of ABA staff activities were once funded out of the general operations budget, now that has been reduced to 47.5%, the remainder coming from "grants."
While touting ABA's good works, Rives pulled the major boner of referring to inmate Bobby Moore as "intellectually handicapped," instead of using any of the politically correct terms for the mentally addled.
Membership-wise, Rives disclosed that of the 411,500 "members" ABA claimed in 2018, only 187,400 were paying dues. As of August 2018, only 42% of the members were dues-paying lawyers, 4% were dues-paying "associate members," 27% were "free" lawyer members and 27% were free student members.
Rives also admits that at year-end 2019, ABA was down to 175,083 dues-paying members. The Statista website shows 1,350,030 for the number of lawyers in the United States at that time.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/740222/number-of-lawyers-us/
It follows that the dues-paying members of ABA as of December, 2019 were no more than 12.97% of U.S. attorneys at that time.
Rives tries to put a happy face on the failing membership picture. He points out that the goal for "new" members was only 10,696, and in the period from May 2019 to January 31, 2020, ABA has picked up 15,479 "new" dues-paying members and 2,039 "new" members who are not paying. He contrasts this with the prior year, in which ABA attracted 48,632 "new" members, but 40,453 of them were not paying. he touts this as showing progress, because, even though the 2019 "new" member number is a fraction of the prior year, 88% of them are paying dues, whereas only 17% of the "new" members stacked on in the preceding year were paying dues. What this really appears to reflect is that once ABA becomes a cost proposition (i.e., other than "free") vastly fewer people are interested. That says a lot.
Of course, in absolute terms, and if we look at "new" members only, ABA is doing better in the sense that the 15,479 "new" dues-paying members for May 2019 to January 31, 2020 are almost double the 8,175 "new" dues-paying members in the preceding year. Yay!!
But what if we don't look at "new" members in isolation? After all, if ABA has lost more existing members than the "new" members it attracted, the new membership model is an expensive failure, leading to no net increase despite the hefty annual cost of the lower dues structure.
Rives admits that as of the present date, six and a half months into the fiscal year, the dollar target for dues has only been 90% met and instead of the total membership target of 179,369, ABA has a total current dues-paying membership of only 159,814 (i.e., now down to 11.8% of U.S. lawyers, using the 2019 population number from Statista).
Rives suggests that the failure to hit the dues income or dues-paying membership targets is not a problem at this point, because five and a half months of the fiscal year remains. He does not explain what is likely to happen in that timeframe that would bring the count of dues-paying members up by 19,555 lawyers. I think it is a stretch, and, happy talk aside, current signs are that the "new membership model" is failing, and the ABA itself is continuing to fail. However, Rives recounts a purported celebrity endorsement from no lesser source than Amal Clooney, who allegedly says the ABA is needed. The video of the Executive Director's report can be found here:
https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2020/02/midyear-meeting-2020--aba-executive-director-addresses-house-of-/
No comments:
Post a Comment