Leading with Purpose: Nate Alder on Service and Stewardship

Episode Notes

Transcript

Amanda Arriaga:

Welcome to the next episode of Leading theBar, brought to you by the National Conference of Bar Presidents. I’m your host, Amanda Arriaga. And with me again today is NCBP President Patrick Palace. NCBP was established in 1950 to provide information and training to state and local bar association leaders. Our mission is to empower, connect, and inspire bar leaders and organizations. Well, today we’re bringing to you a great episode with the great Nate Alder. Patrick, what did you think?

Patrick Palace:

I tell you what, I have been a fan, a full on fanboy of Nate Alder for a very long time. I’ve known him for a couple of decades and I’ve seen him through three different presidencies. And if we’re going to take a snapshot of what leadership and what it means to be a mentor, this is the guy. This is the icon of leadership and mentorship.

Amanda Arriaga:

I heard his name a lot my first year on council, and I was like, who is Nate? And people just kept quoting him and talking about him. And then when I got to meet him, it held up and he was so intense about wanting to know about me and helping me and what do I want to do with my life? And I believe that he actually wants to help get me to those places.

Patrick Palace:

I feel like one of his life purposes is to lift everyone up, to be a leader, to see their potential, to live their values. And he’s a third generation lawyer. I think it’s a third generation lawyer. And so he embodies these core principles, these foundational values of being a lawyer. And as you’re going to hear in this podcast that we’ve done, he really believes in those core values and really believes that the importance that the core values of being a lawyer are the lynchpins to the survival and sustainability, and indeed the ability for the profession to thrive into the future. And that being a mentor isn’t just being nice to somebody or giving little legal help. It is the centerpiece for what being a leader and being a lawyer really is all about.

Amanda Arriaga:

He’s also just so dang humble. He gives everybody compliments. And then you tried to give him some compliments and he wanted to deflect them all, and we hopefully didn’t let him.

Patrick Palace:

Humble. Humble, humble. Humble. Yeah. I think that’s why he’s such a trusted voice, because it’s never about him and it’s always about helping everyone else and doing, working for the greater good and being selfless. And you see that. You see that in everything he says and does.

Amanda Arriaga:

Well. I hope that everyone loves this episode and let us know if you want to part two with Nate. Next season,

Nate Adler:

Courts issue rulings. They write words on paper. They don’t have an enforcement army to go out and enforce those rulings. We rely on the people to trust the rulings, the people to trust the judges. And when faith in the judiciary comes down, lawyers need to rally and we need to rally together, and that’s what theBar is for.

Amanda Arriaga:

Welcome to the next episode of Leading theBar. I’m your host, Amanda Arriaga. With me again is current NCBP, president Patrick Palace, and today we’re talking to another very special guest. Nate Alder served as president of the Utah State Bar from 2008 2009, and president of NCBP from 2019 to 2020. He currently serves as chair of the National Legal Mentoring Consortium. Nate is a shareholder at Christensen and Jensen. He’s also a mediator, co-founder and former chair of the dispute resolution section of the Utah State Bar passed chair of the Utah Council on Conflict Resolution and a member of the ABAs Dispute Resolution section. While Nate doesn’t want you to have a dispute, he would love to help you solve it. Welcome, Nate and Patrick.

Nate Adler:

Thank you, Amanda. That’s really nice.

Amanda Arriaga:

Nate, I want to start with a history lesson and tell us about the biggest challenge that you faced when you were president of the Utah State Bar.

Nate Adler:

When you sign up to be bar president, you don’t know what’s going to happen That year, when I signed up to be bar president for 2008, 2009, I didn’t realize what was going to happen in September of 2008, which was the financial crisis. And it was a huge crisis, big crisis for all of us as lawyers, judges, legislators, lawmakers, leaders of the state, you name it, young lawyers especially. It was a big deal. So that was a big crisis for me, for our governing council, for our BART commission, for our executive team. It was a big deal. It impacted my year and everything that happened that year in lots and lots of ways. Immediately, theBar had some financial issues. We did a bar dues increase, and we’d been planning on doing one for four or five years and just accelerated to do it that year because we needed to.

The court system ran into some financial problems. We did a filing fee increase, substantial one. There were a lot of bills and legislature to address court issues, streamlining processes, you name it. All sorts of things happened. And it was a tough time. It was a tough year. And I’ll never forget, September 15th, 2008, Lehman Brothers goes down and guess what? The Utah State Bar actually had a $300,000 Lehman Brothers note as part of our financial portfolio. So really tough financial hit for our state bar. But besides that, we had a big thing happen a month later with a judicial nomination and took us weeks to get through that. And there was just constantly things happening that year. But if I had to pick one, I would say September 15th was a tough day for our bar. And thereafter, I’d only been bar president since about July. I’m going to say mid July, July 20th, something like that. And so I had a nice July, a nice August, and then September was a big wake up call. So yeah. How’s that?

Patrick Palace:

Well, let me ask you this, because there’s a theme that you hear both in your story, and I think we hear as bar presidents. When I signed up to be Par president, this was what I wanted to do, and then the next sentence is always, and then this happened and this is what I ended up doing instead. And I think that’s one of those critical parts about training to be a bar leader and why mentorship with those bar leaders around us is so important. When things started to go sideways for you, who did you look to?

Nate Adler:

I definitely looked within the circle that I was working with here in Salt Lake City, my executive director, our leadership team. I would say if I were to do it again, I would look a little bit further. I would look to the nation, I would look to the national conference of bar presidents. I would look within a leadership group that I had been developing. I think by the time COVID rolled around, I think we did a better job of connecting nationally. I know NCPP did a really good job during COVID connecting everybody. We actually had a mentoring kind of leaderboard out there with everybody connecting with each other that way. But yeah, I connected with my leadership team with our people, and then I connected outside into the membership. I had a list of, oh, probably 25, 30 managing partners of law firms in the state of Utah.

And I left voicemails and they would email and call me back and I told ’em, we’re facing this crisis. We’re facing this problem, or we need your help. I just got the word out. And so I just built a bigger tent, a bigger circle. But it was great that there was unity. I didn’t get pushback. We were all there to help each other get through this crisis. And I’d say, we need to do this for young lawyers. And people would say, I agree. We need to do this for judges. We agree that kind of thing happened, but there’s always some details, some nitty gritty, some micro that people will tussle over, but should we go this way or that way? Should we hire this person, that person, that kind of thing. But in essence was in a moment of crisis leaders come together and get stuff done. And I definitely feel that now in 2025. I felt it in 19 and 20 as we were kind of gearing up, and then we had March of 2020 happened with COVID.

Patrick Palace:

I know that Amanda has a bunch of questions talking to you specifically about mentoring, but lemme just ask you one more piece about this history. Who are the icons for you? Who are the people that you have always looked up to who have been your mentors, whether you see them every day and talk with them or whether they’re more iconic? I’m wondering who has led you through this path through multiple, multiple presidencies?

Nate Adler:

Well, people listening to this podcast going to recognize some of the names I’m going to say, and I think I’m going to tell it this way, that I was a little bit burned out at the end of 2009. So July, 2009 rolls around, I’m done. I’m like, I’m spent. You guys have gotten a lot out of me as bar president. And I had spent a lot time hours and left my practice to survive a little bit there. So like oh 9, 10, 10, 11, those years I kind of rebuilt my practice, but I was really fortunate that I had kind of met Fred Yuri in that timeframe. I’d gone to some Western States bar conferences. I didn’t want to miss those trips. I went after I was president of the Utah State Bar, kind of like, Hey, on my own dime, I want to go on these trips. And then I became president of the Western States Bar in 2013.

So I’m four years removed from being bar president and I’m now the president of Western States Bar. And Fred had kind of encouraged me to do that. And then others had encouraged me. There’s a woman by the name of Roseanne Lucianic who worked for the A division of Bar Services now called Center for Bar Leadership. And she kind of took me on a walk one day. We were at one of these Western states bar meetings, and she was kind of sizing me up, kind of like, is this guy got what it takes or not? She took me on a walk. We walked along the path at the hotel where all these meetings are and whatnot. Western states leaders are gathered. And I think by the end of that meeting on that walk, she just said to me, you ought to consider doing something bigger. You ought to consider more.

And so I did. And Western State Bar came along in 2013, the president of the A BA was coming to those meetings and that person, bill Robinson put me on a committee with the A BA. It was a standing committee on professionalism. We got to work on rule 1.1 and technology, lots of other things. That’s Fred Yuri recruited me to that. So between Bill Robinson, Roseanne Lucianic, Fred Uri, I get onto council of NCVP, and then my first president to serve on council with is Carl Smallwood. I’m like, okay, so this is what leadership looks like. I am going to do this. I’ve seen the best. And I’m not a little kid in the candy store. As I say, I’m just a kid from Cash Valley, little Podunk nowhere, middle of the great base in Utah. And here I am hanging out with these giants. And so there’s a lot of people that got me here. Those are four of those early people that got me here. And then it’s a long list of people that I really look up to. So

Patrick Palace:

You’re saying more than one mentor got you to this place where

Nate Adler:

It takes a village to raise these young leaders? Yeah, bar leaders don’t come through one handshake. It’s a lot of handshakes. It’s a lot of pats on the back, A lot of embrace from a lot of people. I was embraced by dozens and dozens of people. People have to believe in me to sponsor me, to push me forward to me on this, to put me on that. So yeah, I mean, having Fred Uri nominate me and having Bill Robinson select me and having Jane Reardon encourage me and Lori Keating at the Ohio Bar Foundation kind of enjoy working with me. It builds. That’s a lot of building. This is mentoring, by the way. I call it peer to peer or organizational or leadership mentoring, but I’m 58 years old. I’m being mentored right now. There are people that are mentoring me right now. We had the A president come to Salt Lake City two weeks ago. She’s mentoring me, she’s encouraging me to do certain things. She’s trying to figure out if she can put her faith in me. I’m trying to figure out if I can put my faith in her project, this or that. We’re trying to work together and we got a lot of stuff to do, and it’s peer to peer. It’s really cool. So mentoring doesn’t end. Mentoring is not for 20 year olds. And then we’re done. Mentoring is for everyone, and we continue.

Amanda Arriaga:

So one theme that we’ve heard on this podcast is when folks were president of theBar and they had a crisis, they didn’t know about NCBP yet to be able to ask for help. So we didn’t know that there was a bigger tent. We could only look to who we know. When did you find NCBP? Why was it important to you to lead it, and what was the biggest issue you faced as president?

Nate Adler:

So I’m one of those people that found NCBP the right way. President Elect of the State bar. I went to the meetings. I’m one of those people that didn’t see my future in NCBP. I thought it was a, you got to go for a couple of times and be done. I didn’t look to NCPP as much as I could have or should have during that oh eight crisis. It was such a big crisis. I think we just hunkered down. I will say that in the year leading up to my presidency, my president-elect year, we did look nationally for some help on a judicial crisis that we had during my predecessors year when I was being mentored to be president. And he was a great bar president, but we faced kind of a legislative, some tinkering, some real problems with our judiciary, and we wanted to solve those problems.

And so we did look nationally. We did look to NCBP. We did look to the A BA, and we finally got to isles, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System. So eventually we found our way to Isles in Denver and Isles came to Salt Lake and helped us through a crisis. And so the Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission, which we have now in Utah that we’ve had since 2008, is a product of us reaching out nationally and finding resources nationally. And so I’m very grateful to Isles in Denver at the University of Denver to come over to Salt Lake and help us through that moment. But yeah, that would’ve been us calling Roseanne Lucianic to the division of Bar Services. Now the Center for Bar Leadership and to N-C-B-P-N-C-B-P being there to help us in our time of need. It was really important to us. So yeah, that happened in 2008, but I think everybody was in the same boat in September of 2008 with the financial crisis and the impact on law firms and young lawyers and law schools and everybody. And so yeah, I attended those meetings. I would’ve attended February of 2009, and I’m sure I was as shellshocked as anybody else was. But it’s important.

Amanda Arriaga:

You must find special value in NCBP because much like being bar president, you graduate, you’re past president and then you leave. But with NCBP, you are still around and many of the former NCBP presidents are still around. So why is it so important to you?

Nate Adler:

Yeah, I really believe in the impact that comes from the organized bar. So if I go to one meeting in 2026 in San Antonio and I can impart some experience or knowledge or wisdom to five bar presidents during that meeting, and those five bar presidents go out and do great things in their bars, that’s five communities, that’s five states, that’s five regions, that’s five leaders, that’s five groups that are going to have real impact. And there’s no way that I, in Salt Lake City can have real impact in Memphis, but through my being involved with NCVP and getting to know the president of the Memphis Bar or the Tennessee Bar, all of a sudden I can help that bar and they can learn from what I’ve experienced and I can help them with what they’re going through. And so it is a mentoring organization, it’s a mentoring leadership organization.

And the second that I got on council, I realized I’m there with these bar greats and maybe I can aspire to be one of them and give my time some years of my life to the organized bar. But the impact will be huge. And the impact is huge. So when you look at 2025 and you think about the organized bar and how we’re going to stand up for the rule of law, for democracy, for checks and balances, for constitutional government, for separation of powers, for young lawyers, for law schools, for diversity, for law school diversity, for bar diversity, for judiciary diversity, for a reflection of our community standards, for ethics, for civility, for professionalism, for the highest of the profession, the highest standards. I mean, that’s what we’re going to do. And I’m part of that and I just am so honored to be a part of that. Like I said, I’m just a kid from a small town and northern Utah, and here I am on this national stage helping every single community recommit to the standards by which our nation is great.

Patrick Palace:

For those of you who know Nate, then you’ll know what I’m about to say is true. Nate, you are not just a formal mentor where you have somebody assigned to you that you mentor like you always do, but you are a functional everyday good guy. Lean in to help mentor. We go to these NCBP conferences, I know where to find you. You’re out in the hallway with some incoming president or president-elect or board member aspiring to be president, and you are listening intently to everything they say and giving them a little bit of advice and tons of encouragement. And everybody that walks by in the hallway, you stop and say, Hey, hey, hey, I want you to meet this person I just met. It’s so-and-so. The president-elect of whatever state or place. And you grow everybody’s knowledge and you support their abilities. They may not feel they have and you grow them. And that really is an important part of how you mentor with everybody. How do you develop that? How do we make everybody like that?

Nate Adler:

Well, I’m just doing what other people have done. I just see what I see and I model behavior. That’s good. Everybody that I’ve been involved with at NCVP is this way. There are not people shying away from the connections, the effort, the greater circle, the broadening, the inclusion, the belonging, like everybody I know at NCVP is this way. I can’t say that for every organization that I’ve been involved in, but NCVP is very much like an urgent family matter. We have got to connect Jacksonville with Tacoma. What’s happening in Anchorage really matters to us in Alabama. I mean, what happens in Utah this year, if we impeach a judge in Utah in 2026, it’s a big deal and it’ll be a big deal from Maine to San Mateo. Every bar organization will take notice during George Floyd, during COVID, during Ferguson Bar organizations take note and are involved and want to be ahead of an issue coming to their community.

They want to be proactive. They want to learn from the various organizations that have been through stuff. Utah, learn from Washington. Everyone learns from California. Everyone learns from Texas. Everyone learns from Florida. Everyone learns from other communities. I am a big believer in getting everyone who cares connected. So I don’t know. It seems so natural to me, Patrick. I just am excited. It’s infectious. It don’t know if Amanda tells me that she has never met Fred. Yuri, I am going to set out to introduce you to Fred Yuri, and if we don’t see him in San Antonio, I’m going to set up a Zoom call so you can meet him. We just have to have you meet him, Amanda. And so yeah, I want Amanda to have everything that I have, which is this incredible fabric of leaders that are the best people I know,

Amanda Arriaga:

But you do more than just connect people. And I’ve seen this happen in real time. So we chatted in Toronto and then even on your free time, we’re having lunch. We have mutual friends that are going together.

Nate Adler:

Well, thanks to you.

Amanda Arriaga:

You didn’t say it like this. Well, you kind of said, what do you want to do? How can I help you? I want to know everything about you, and I think you meant it, and we could have just sat with our cliques and hung out with the people that we know, but we didn’t. And I think that you mean it and you keep meaning it. And so it’s not just that you are introducing people and that’s your skill. You see them and try to grow them.

Nate Adler:

I don’t know. You’re being really nice to say all these nice things. It’s just that I like hanging out with really cool people, and it’s like all the cool kids are at NCBP at these meetings, these national leadership meetings. It’s really cool to hang out with you, Amanda. I mean, it’s cool to hang out with you and your friends and then I get to learn about what you guys are doing, and then I realize how important the work is, and you happen to be at one of the most important states in the nation. It’s like you’re going to be, and by the way, I don’t believe you as a past president, sure, you’re a past president, but you have so many more leadership roles to take on in your life, in your career that, I mean, I’m going to be the person that says, yeah, I knew Amanda way back when and then here, I know her now as well. 10 years from now, Amanda, what are you going to be leading? What charge do you have? What organization are you running? What thing are you saving? I want to be a part of that, even if it’s just a tiny little thing just to be able to help you in some tiny way. I’m just a big believer in really talented, smart people like you and all of our friends at NCVP. So man, it’s just an honor to hang out with everybody.

Amanda Arriaga:

Well, one thing I want to steal from you and literally steal it and put it on merch is that you have this famous quote before I ever knew you, people would talk about how Nate Alder said, bar president for a year leader for a lifetime, we need to put that on merch, on shirts, on bags and sell that.

Nate Adler:

Yeah. I don’t know how I started saying that, but it just became so obvious. I think you can hear it just in my voice right now. I mean, just the people that I was hanging out with, executive council in and of itself is leader for a lifetime. You were bar president. These people are like, I can’t wait to get retirement so I can relax. No, no, no, no, no. I can’t wait to get done with my bar presidency or I can go back to doing something else. No, I mean, you have just been given this incredible opportunity to be bar president and now you get to continue on and everyone respects you because you were theBar president. People still remember me as bar president, even though it was like how many 17 years ago? Nate’s our bar president. That’s what people say. When I get introduced in a mediation or a case or meeting boardroom somewhere, people will say, this is Nate Alder.

He’s our bar president. Wait a minute. I’ll always say I was, or that was a long time ago. And they’re like, well, Nate’s our bar president. I stand for something. I carried the banner of the profession for that year, and I carry the banner of the profession for a lifetime. When you do your bingo card, when you wake up in the morning, you’re like, you got three or four things you got to fill in. And then you got 10 that don’t, 15 that you don’t know what’s going to happen. Well, we know what’s on the bingo card for all of our bar leaders. It’s civility. It’s professionalism, it’s reputation, it’s ethics. It’s hard work. It’s the independence of the judiciary. It’s fair and impartial. Courts it. It’s separation of powers. It’s constitutional government. Those are on our bingo card. Every day. A bar leader wakes up years after, 17 years later, it’s still on the bingo card.

Amanda Arriaga:

I’m adding bar president bingo to the merch.

Nate Adler:

Hey, let’s do a bingo. Yeah, I mean, what’s the free spot? I don’t know. Rule of law. You’re bar president. Yeah, you’re trying to do young lawyer leadership development. You’re trying to do governance. You’re trying to do bylaw amendments. You’re trying to do diversity equity, inclusion. You’re trying to do judicial raises. You’re trying to do funding for this project. Pro Bon, you’re trying to do all those things. But man, a lot of those numbers on that bingle card do not change when you’re five years out after being bar president like, Hey, I was bar president oh 8 0 9. Here I am in 2025. The issues are so critical. 17 years later, I’m honored to be considered someone’s bar president.

Patrick Palace:

One of the things that you do, and I’ve of course seen you now in three leadership positions in the time we’ve known each

Nate Adler:

Other. We’ve been friends for a while.

Patrick Palace:

It’s been a while. And one of the things, there’s the idea of a steward leadership that you should be bringing up people around you all the time, which you demonstrate in a lot of ways. But one of the things that I think everyone has as they’re getting ready to become president, they’re president elect. They’re sitting in the shadow of their president. One day you’re president elect the next day, guess what? You’re president. And I don’t know of many presidents who really lean to make sure that their president elect is really ready for that job. And I remember you were NCBP president and Aurora, Austria was their president elect. Aurora is.

Nate Adler:

She’s amazing.

Patrick Palace:

Aurora is amazing, but so were you because she was president elect.

Nate Adler:

Oh, I wanted Aurora in involved in everything I did.

Patrick Palace:

She

Nate Adler:

Was amazing.

Patrick Palace:

You’re running the meeting, you are the president, and you say, you know what, Aurora, you take the meeting today. You go impromptu Here you go be president for a while. You’re amazing. You do this. And I love the way you kind of brought her along.

Nate Adler:

I could do that with Aurora. I could do that with Mike free. I could do that with anybody. The thing about NCPP executive Council and the chairs getting up to president, every single one of those 25 people can run this thing, can run 10 of these things, can run 20 of these things. This is the high power group of everybody, amazing people. And Aurora is a great example of that. I mean, she’s a phenomenal person. So look, I’ve got Jennifer parent ahead of me, and I’ve got Aurora behind me, like I’m between two greats. And it’s so easy. It’s so easy to be a leader in an organization where everybody’s a leader.

Amanda Arriaga:

What’s funny about that shout out from Patrick is Patrick does the same thing, is he is our president. He has these very elaborate meetings. We have these specially called meetings about very important topics. And then he’ll text me and say, before we start, will you give an update on the podcast? The meeting’s not about that. We don’t need to be talking about that, but you do that too. So I guess you’ll learn that from Nate.

Nate Adler:

I think we’re all learning from each other. It’s really fun to be part of a leadership mentoring organization where we care deeply about one, the issues and then two, the people, and then three, getting some outcome, some impact, some products, some rollout, like the takeaway, like, let’s get this thing. Everybody wants to get stuff done. Everybody’s run a metro bar, a county bar, an affinity bar, a state bar, a voluntary involuntary state bar. Everybody’s, and by the way, and I bet you if we put everybody’s resumes together, they’ve done that for sure. And then they’ve run the United Way, and then they’ve run the school board, and then they’ve run local politics, and then they’ve run some judicial committees, and then they’ve run their law firm, and then they leaders in law school, leaders in the university. I mean, it’s great to be with leaders.

So yeah, I mean, what’s kind of hard for me is that here I’m just so excited and talking about all my friends who are leaders. I just think we need to expand the circle like a hundred fold. When you go to law school, you’re getting what a jd, is that a technical degree? Is that a trade degree? Is that an industry degree? What is that? Is that a medical degree? Is that an optometry degree? What are you an accountant? What is it? Well, I thought a lot about this. When you go to law school and you come out and you’re a lawyer and you take theBar and you pass theBar and you’re a lawyer, and then you’re all of a sudden representing people in various instances, court boardrooms, transactions, you name it, agencies, hearings, you are a leader, the jd, the law degree, the law license passing, theBar becoming a lawyer, time as a lawyer, experience as a lawyer.

It’s leadership. It’s just flat out leadership and lawyers who don’t view themselves as leaders are missing the boat. And so join a leadership organization if you’re a lawyer or be the leader of an organization if you’re a lawyer. Lawyers need to be on boards. Lawyers need to be in organizational settings where we need leaders. We need leaders, leaders, leaders. Like 25 of the 56 signers where lawyers, we’ve got to get lawyers into leadership positions. And so NCBP needs to expand the circle, the A BA needs to expand the circle. theBar needs to expand the circle, the state, the county, the affinity bar, the metro bar needs to expand the circle. We’re always inviting in. We invite any and all to come in and be a leader in a leadership organization because guess what? Lawyers are leaders.

Patrick Palace:

I really couldn’t agree more. And I say that to everybody in my firm like, you’re a leader here. This is what you are. If you’re a lawyer, you are going to lead. And we encourage it. Nate, I think about being a young lawyer coming into the profession about now and looking around trying to get your feet on the ground. What does this profession look like? How does this really work? At a time when we’re having things like the independence of the profession being challenged throughout the country, large law firms making agreements with our administration after they’re being sued or threatened with executive orders. We see the judiciary under attack and their independence being challenged and judges being called out by different political parties. I wonder if you’re a new member of this bar, how important do you think it is to help them understand the nobility and the history on which they’re standing?

Nate Adler:

Such a great question. I think I’m going to go about it this way. Like you said, Hey, I’m a brand new lawyer. I was a 28-year-old brand new lawyer in 1995. I was also a brand new father, and I just moved from one state to the next, started my career back home here in Utah. If this was the climate in which I had joined the profession, what would I be thinking? What would I be seeing? So here’s my advice to the 28-year-old Nate. Go find your bar president. Go find your bar organization. Show up at theBar. You’re a member of the profession. You’ve joined the organization. Don’t wait for the email. Don’t wait for the newsletter. Show up. Go to the thing. Look for the people. Now, there’s a corollary to that, and that is that theBar needs to earn my showing up. theBar needs to earn my trust.

TheBar needs to earn my faith. theBar needs to reach out. theBar needs to invite. That means what? Organizationally or does that mean personally? So theBar president needs to reach out and find me, and theBar leader needs to reach out and find me, and a member of theBar needs to reach out and find me. And a leader on a subcommittee that did something two years ago that cares about an issue that’s dormant or no longer an issue and moved on to the next issue, but is still a bar leader in some way, that person needs to reach out and find me. I need to be welcomed in. I need to be invited in. I need to be embraced, encouraged, supported, lifted. I need to be brought in. I need to be part of the group. Otherwise, I’m just going to stay on the sideline. Fortunately for me, I’m not that guy that’s going to sit on the sideline, but there are a lot people who will sit on the sideline. And then fortunately for me, guess what?

My first employer, federal district court judge, great guy, happened to be a bar leader, former president of the state bar, went to NCVP, went to the a, a meetings national leader, and then my second employer at the law firm, the founder of our law firm. Same thing, state bar President, N-C-B-P-A-B-A meetings, all that kind of stuff. I just feel really fortunate that my first two employers were people that didn’t question the organized bar and absolutely wanted me involved and encouraged me to join and show up. So I showed up at my very first event, an annual meeting. Sure enough, I met at my peer level, the young lawyers president and his president elect. And between those two, I got invited in and I found a belonging. And I’ve been passionate about the issues ever since. My concern is that young lawyers join the profession and only see the trees and never see the forest.

They get through the NPRE and they forget that we have the rules of professional conduct. We have the preamble, and they forget that third prong of you’re a representative and you’re an officer of the court, but you’re a special citizen with the responsibility for the quality of justice in society. And that third prong of being a lawyer in our preamble, in our rules of professional conduct, really, really, really has to be core to the identity of a young professional, to be core of being a lawyer. And when we forget that, we forget those three prongs, and we just focus on the business, the industry, the day to day, the trees. Yeah, we’re just not as strong as profession as we could be. So I’m a big believer in joining, but also earning that trust to join.

Amanda Arriaga:

Well, and you were lucky because your employers knew the value of theBar Association. Not everyone gets that. Some people work for big firms that are strict, and the number one thing is make money. Money. I came up in public service. And so bar associations is not really a thing that people in public service need to do because we don’t need clients. So there’s no value to network. So if people don’t get what you got, then it is theBar association’s job to make that value proposition because we need all the members and all their great ideas.

Nate Adler:

Yeah, theBar has work to do. I’ll tell you a story. When I was bar president, the Attorney General of the state of Utah came to a bar commission meeting, sat at the end of the table and asked to be excluded from theBar. He says, we do our own CLE. We want different bar dues rates for state attorney generals, et cetera, et cetera. We don’t need theBar. Well, that was a big wake up call. We need to open the tent to everybody. We’re asking everybody to pay bar dues. And so we need to make sure that everybody feels included. Parts of the criminal defense don’t feel included. Parts of the tax lawyers don’t feel included. Parts of state attorney generals don’t feel included. Guess what? It’s a united front. We’re all here for the judges. We’re all here for the judiciary. We’re all here for law schools.

It’s that third prong. And when you read in, maybe this is the time for me to read. This says from the preamble, as a public citizen, a lawyer should seek improvement of the law, access to the legal system, the administration of justice, and the quality of service rendered by the legal profession. So when we get into our little divisive kind of spots like, oh, I’m this, I’m a that, we forget that, Hey, we’re public citizens and we’re here to improve the law, access to justice, access to the legal system, administration of justice, the quality of service rendered by the legal profession. That sentence alone should unite every faction of theBar. And then it says, as a member of a learning profession, a lawyer should cultivate knowledge of the law beyond its use for clients, employ that knowledge and reform of the law and work to strengthen legal education.

So we should all rally around what? CLE, but also law schools. Guess what? Pipeline undergraduate. In addition, a lawyer should further the public’s understanding of and confidence in the rule of law and the justice system because legal institutions in a constitutional democracy upon popular participation and support to maintain their authority, guess what, we’re united here. Don’t be fractious, be united. We are here to support. Guess what? An institution of government that needs, every one of us courts issue rulings. They write words on paper. They don’t have an enforcement army to go out and enforce those rulings. We rely on the people to trust the rulings, the people to trust the judges. And when faith in the judiciary comes down, lawyers need to rally and we need to rally together. And that’s what theBar is for. I could keep going. I just think the preamble. Okay, everybody needs to read the preamble. I hope everybody on this podcast says, I’m going to go read that preamble, the model rules to my state Rules of professional conduct. So yeah, I’m a preamble guy through and through. I love the preamble. It’s my professional identity, and I hope that every bar leader listening says, I’m going to read those paragraphs in the preamble. How many paragraphs is it? 12 or 13? Oh, sorry. It’s more than that. Read the preamble. It’s pretty amazing.

Patrick Palace:

Well, you opened up the door for me just to mention this, that at the national conference bar presidents, we have ratified what we call the pledge.

Nate Adler:

Oh yeah. The pledge is amazing,

Patrick Palace:

Which is the core values of the profession that include

Those elements that are in the opening phrases of the preamble of the code of professional conduct throughout the country, and also our oath, right? We’ve taken an oath as lawyers to do things like defend and support the state and federal constitutions. All of these things really are the fabric of us as lawyers. So lemme just ask you this, maybe it’s a bit of a meatball question, and you sure answered it in different ways, but at the end of the day, what’s really the most important thing about being a mentor to lawyers coming up in this society, in this system, in this democracy?

Nate Adler:

Yeah. Boy, that’s such a great question. I’m going to answer your question and then go back. So yeah, I think the quick answer to your question is maybe the most important thing that I can do as a mentor in the episode, the episodic mentoring moment into the formal, the informal, the peer, the circle, the sponsorship moment, any form of mentoring moment that I’m given, and this is why on this podcast, I’m going to say it again. Read the preamble, see if all of those things are who you are, and can you uphold those things? Can you embody those things? Can you do those things? Now, guess what the answer is? Absolutely yes. Right? We took this oath when we entered the profession. Now I’m going to go back and tell you that one of the great things about me being involved in theBar is that I got to be young lawyers president.

And as young lawyers president, I was the easy Pickens for the Supreme Court to go onto this professionalism committee that they had. And I was on there for 12 years. And during the middle of this long decades long professionalism committee, a Supreme Court Justice, who was the chair of the committee at that point in time, was talking about the oath that we took and that I had probably taken, what, six or seven years earlier. And that some of the lawyers on that committee had taken, what, 25 years earlier? And she said, how do we retake the oath? And we debated for an hour. We got to figure out a way to retake the oath like a reval because we needed it. And we came up with a mechanism for taking the oath again. And guess what? Lawyers in my state take the oath, retake the oath every year. And so as this pledge is coming together that I’m saying Patrick and others kind of put together, I’m excited. I mean, I’m like, this is great. This pledge to reaffirm our oaths is exactly what we need, and we don’t need it because we’re in crisis. We need it because this is who we are.

My state does it. We vow every year. We take the oath every year. So guess what? As a nation, let’s take the oath. Let’s pledge to reaffirm our oath, to affirm all the standards and the ideals and the principles and the constitutional obligations that we have. So as I was seeing this come together, I was really excited. And hopefully this will be part of NPS legacy and Patrick Geers as a leader, and I support it. Yeah, I have a copy right here. I’ve just been enjoying reading it again. I read it a few weeks ago when it came through my email. But man, if every lawyer, just think about that. If 1 million lawyers today wake up and say, I’m going to pledge myself to the highest ideals of the profession, and I’m going to be a leader and I’m going to mentor, nothing stops us.

Nothing stops America at that point. But we have gotten into the spot where everyone is very kind, focused on their, their bingo card is limited to those three or four things. And we definitely need everybody to kind of step up, step out, use their voice, be strong, help others see the big forest that American democracy is, and that the American legal system is, our judicial system is so precious and it’s so fragile, and lawyers need to support it a hundred percent of the time and build it, shape it, improve it, build a pipeline to it from undergrad into the profession and up to the judiciary. We need the best people in the profession. So yeah, I don’t know. If I were to say something today, I would just say everybody, be a mentor, everybody. Invite everybody include, find those that need to belong, encourage ’em, build them, strengthen them, and get them to where they want to be. Because everybody is unique, special, and wonderful, and we need everybody. And when we lose people, when we divide, when we are fractious, when we’re not together, then it’s hard. And we can see that happen. It’s hard to watch.

Amanda Arriaga:

Can you talk about what you do with the National Legal Mentoring Consortium and how the audience can get involved?

Nate Adler:

Yeah. Well, I’ll just say that it started maybe almost two decades ago. I think we’re kind of getting into our second decade here. It started with some really great people that just were very interested in mentoring. If you go to legal mentoring.org, so the National Legal Mentoring [email protected], you’ll see the group there. Some of those people have been there from the beginning. I kind of joined a little bit later, but I was really fortunate in 2009 to roll out mentoring in our state as bar president. We had followed Georgia. So there were two states in the nation with these big mandatory mentoring programs. And then Oregon, New Mexico and Nevada quickly followed Utah. So then all of a sudden we had five. And then other states have kind of joined. And then there’s some really big voluntary mentoring programs. So Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, others like that, Michigan.

And so South Carolina was a big leader in this. They’ve got a great mentoring program. Their law school was just tremendous. The deans of that law school have been big supporters and big believers in professionalism. They have a professionalism center. So mentoring just kind of had its moment. So people started meeting informally together, like 30 or 40 people would get together every two years. And there were a lot of meetings in Columbia, South Carolina. They met in Minneapolis, they met in Denver, Chicago, things like that. And so all of a sudden it’s like this group was together, people that cared about mentoring. And the idea was to build best practices and to encourage mentoring programs, affinity bars, to have them like the ABOs, the ends of courts, the groups that want to improve mentoring in their organizations, create mentoring as a leadership tool. Law firms were deeply, deeply interested in this big law was interested in this.

The attrition had a big law, was just hard. And so mentoring was seen as a way to retain, attract, retain, develop, succeed with their employees, their lawyers. And then law schools were deeply involved in this and deeply interested in law schools. Were doing alumni network mentoring, but also peer-to-peer mentoring. So this had all this energy. So I started going to these meetings and then just kind of got involved and got pulled into the center of it. I became chair in 2018, and we had our meeting in Columbia, South Carolina. That was really fun. Great, great people there. We were talking about technology probably for one of the first times in 2018, how to mentor with technology and to use technology to better the program efficiency and whatnot. 2020 rolled along. We thought, okay, we’ll skip a year. We will go to 2021. We did an online 2021.

I was still chair. I’ve stayed as chair for a while because we’ve kind of been hit by COVID and whatnot. We ended up not doing a 21, but we did it in 22 and have done a 24 conference. So every other year, but we’ve missed the 2020 timeframe. So I mean, these meetings go back well into the 2010s. 20 twelves, 20 fourteens, 20 sixteens. So we’re going to do a 2026 conference in October. On October 22nd, 2026. It’ll be five hours, six hours on virtual. We used to do two and three day in-person meetings, and now we’re down to virtual because that’s the best way to run the organization. And anybody that cares about legal mentoring in the United States is there. We want law firms to join. We want law schools to join. We want all bars to join. We want courts to join. We’ve had the chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court.

A couple of years ago. We had the chief justice of the Oregon Supreme Court, just last conference. Speak to us. We’re there. We’re legit. This is the real thing. We’re trying to do good work. And so people join and organizations join and they participate, and then they learn. Learn. The latest. I’ll hold up. Colorado is a great state mentoring program. I’ll hold up. Idaho’s new program is a great state bar mentoring program. We’ll talk about Florida’s new unique approach, Washington’s new unique approach. We will talk about certain law schools that are doing the right way. Certain law firms are doing the right way. We’ll talk about best practices. So it’s an organization that it’s now a nonprofit. We have a board of directors, we have an advisory council, we have committees and subcommittees. We do communications, outreach, member work. And then the big event is we will meet every other year in conference, and then we’re trying to meet in the off years in these one hours.

Amanda Arriaga:

Well, Nate, if you weren’t a lawyer, what would you be doing?

Nate Adler:

This is such a fun question. I wanted to be a high school history teacher. Then I wanted to be a junior college history teacher, and then I thought I’d be a university history teacher. I kind of teach the great stuff to everybody. My dad was a history teacher, history professor. Just admired my dad to no end, my mom and dad, just amazing people. I wanted to be like them. My mom was a journalist. So there’s a lot of things I would probably think about. I love journalists, I loved teachers. But guess what, grandpas, were a business man, so why not be the insurance salesman for the entire my community? Those guys have a good life, right? Car dealer. I could have been a car dealer. I really think I would want to be something like a CEO, like a tech. CEO would be a lot of fun.

But I’m not great at tech. I know I’m not going to be a doctor. I know I’m not going to be an engineer or an accountant too hard. Those are technical degrees that are going to be hard for me. But okay, now that I’ve got the fun part out, I think the answer to your question, Amanda, would be something like this. If I was not a lawyer, I think I would want to be involved in the solutions to our community’s problems, our state’s problems, our nation’s problems, and frankly, the world’s problems. I would want to be involved in the things that we are doing as leaders, so public policy, government solutions to real problems. I would want to be involved in those things. So if I’m a nonprofit director or if I’m an author or a professor or a thinker or a governor or something, I think I need to be involved in finding solutions to the big problems and the micro problems, individual’s problems.

We’ve been so fortunate in America, so incredibly fortunate to be Americans and those of us that are fortunate enough to travel around the world and see other countries and see what they’re going through. You come home and you’re like, how did I get so lucky to be born into America? I was born in this country. And America is the solution for so many of the world’s problems because we have been working on solutions here, and we need to take our solutions around the world. And one of those great solutions is democracy, pure, fantastic democracy, true democracy around the world, and watch it grow in those communities, in those countries. And we need to grow it in America. We need to grow American democracy. We need to get back to true, fantastic constitutional democracy in America. And so I would want to be involved in those kinds of arenas, those solutions. And so give me a title and just get me a job. Put me to work, Amanda.

Amanda Arriaga:

Well, I like that. In that alternate timeline, we still would’ve been friends.

Nate Adler:

Yeah, we definitely would be friends. And you tell me that you’ve got a job that’s not a lawyer and that solves all these problems and we get to work together. And then hey, that’d be great.

Amanda Arriaga:

I’ll find it. Well, thank you so much for being here. Patrick, do you have any final words for us?

Patrick Palace:

No, I just want to thank Nate. It’s always such an honor and a pleasure to work with you and by you, and thank you for your words of wisdom, and thank you for your decades of true leadership and mentorship.

Nate Adler:

Hey, thank you both. Really honored to be here with both of you, honored to be serving with both of you. Great job on this podcast, you guys. Really, really fantastic job.

Amanda Arriaga:

Well, thank you for being here. Thank all of you for joining us for this episode of Leading theBar and learn [email protected].

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