Florida Bar’s Big Challenge: Helping Attorneys Stay in Practice

As Florida’s bar expands to over 115,000 members, state leaders are looking for strategies to retain existing talent and keep lawyers from taking down their shingles.

In listening sessions held across the Sunshine State, hundreds of attorneys told The Florida Bar President Sia Baker-Barnes that they’re struggling, and want the state to provide leadership on issues that have them considering quitting the profession.

“We had a lot of participation from more seasoned lawyers who were saying, ‘I’m not sure how much longer I can keep up with the pace of what’s expected,’” said Baker-Barnes, who is a shareholder at Searcy Denney. “Lawyers are struggling with managing all of the expectations and obligations that we have both personally and professionally.”

People that normally wouldn’t attend bar events—especially solo or small firm veterans who believe the bar exists mostly to punish lawyers—voiced three main issues: keeping their practices running despite changes to Florida’s civil litigation rules, dealing with bad actors in their profession, and artificial intelligence.

Addressing these worries is a committee focusing on sustainability, hoping that in uncertain times The Florida Bar can convince members it’s here to do more than give a slap on the wrist—it can lend a hand up.

New Rules, Big Hurdles

A recurring problem for many practitioners, Baker-Barnes said, is that new rules are making small-time litigation unworkable.

Starting in 2023 the Florida Supreme Court overhauled the state’s litigation rules to expedite cases piling up in state trial courts. It’s common for state judges in busy circuits to oversee 2,000 matters, and they shoulder that without dedicated clerk staff like federal judges—who annually handle fewer than 500 cases on average.

One lawyer from the Florida Keys told Baker-Barnes that changes to speed up discovery have essentially foreclosed his ability to charge local business clients small retainers to file complaints that bring people to the settlement table in low-dollar disputes. Clients he’s had for more than 20 years are now out a lawyer.

Balancing quicker dockets with preserving court access for small business is something the bar is always working to iron out, said G.C. Murray Jr., co-chair of the sustainability committee.

They’re also designing “tool kits” geared toward different phases of lawyers’ careers. Murray says providing practitioners with guidance on the rules and other state resources that might be siloed away—like low-cost continuing legal education that can help adapt to the new litigation system pace—could hit the target.

“We don’t think everyone needs much, but they need something,” said Murray, a solo practitoner.

Reporting Bad Actors

A Florida Bar survey finds attorneys say their jobs are becoming less enjoyable, and lawyers told Baker-Barnes that feeling stems from an inability to escape unprofessional adversaries.

“In the short term if you have to deal with an unprofessional lawyer you can do that,” Baker-Barnes said. “Over the long term lawyers tend to get burned out, and feel burnout more the more exposure they have to those kinds of situations.”

There’s a gap between behavior that violates ethics rules protecting the public, and the minor-yet-corrosive misfeasance that falls short of state sanction, said sustainability committee member Kurt Alexander.

The bar is going to address the misfeasance by promoting local professionalism panels across the state. These panels, which take referrals from judges, court staff, clients and opposing counsel, hold meetings to chastise lawyers anonymously on everything from rude emails to AI brief hallucinations.

A Bloomberg Law review found only 53 complaints were filed in these committees over the last six-month reporting period, with many regions reporting no complaints. Alexander, a solo practitioner, said some lawyers are wary about advertising a complaint system, but more issues—from judges habitually failing to file orders to lawyers making inappropriate jokes in court—could be tamped down by a local scolding.

“If something is serious and someone is stealing money out of a trust account or committing a crime that has to go to he bar,” he said. “But if someone is behaving badly that doesn’t have to go straight to the executioner.”

AI Tools

A thornier question is how the state can help lawyers outside of big firms adjust to security and work product concerns tied to AI.

The Florida Bar—the third largest mandatory bar in the country—was among the first governing bodies to lay down AI-specific ethics rules. But an onslaught of hallucinated briefs have generated pushback from a judiciary frustrated by “AI-generated slop.”

Murray said the sustainability committee is considering ideas from providing a member service that could include access to some AI tool, to a bar software feature that could assist with research of state rules.

Baker-Barnes pointed to the state’s Nota service, a free trust account management software for members. While that’s cut down on ethics breaches involving trust accounts, lawyers are still occasionally reprimanded for those kinds of violations.

“We’re not going to solve all of these problems because we can’t solve the world’s problems,” she said. “But the goal is to try to assist our members as best we can.”