Message from the Chair

By Bryan Schwartz

Bryan Schwartz is Chair of the State Bar of California’s Labor and Employment Law Section. His firm is Bryan Schwartz Law (www.BryanSchwartzLaw.com) in Oakland, representing workers in wage-and-hour, discrimination, harassment, whistleblower retaliation, and other types of individual, class, and multi-plaintiff actions in federal and state courts and a variety of administrative fora. He serves also on the boards of the California Employment Lawyers Association, the Legal Aid Society-Employment Law Center, and FAIR (www.fair-foundation.org), a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing diversity in the employment bar.

I am honored to become Chair of our 7500-member Section after serving for the last seven years as one of our Executive Committee members and advisors. What I have observed, having attended and helped to plan dozens of Section meetings, conferences, and seminars, is consistent with what we are seeing in the results of our Section’s first-ever comprehensive membership satisfaction survey, profiled in the cover story of this month’s Law Review—that we are a pretty satisfied bunch. We are in an intellectually stimulating practice area that is constantly evolving and presenting new challenges, and we are proud of the work we are doing helping our clients, and value our relationships with colleagues. I hope, as Chair, that the Section will continue its track record of providing excellent educational programming to help us thrive.

But, we can be doing better in our chosen career path, and my goal as Chair is for the Section to help us achieve that. Less than half of us feel really great about our practice. I hope the Section can help us take our law practices and our lives from "good to great," as one popular business author (James Collins) described it.