Message from the President

Dear Visitor:

Welcome to the Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis (“BAMSL”) website. The Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis is one of the oldest bar associations in the country. Our organization and/or our members have been directly involved in such crucial projects as the creation of the Non-Partisan Court Plan, the creation of the American Bar Association and the creation of Legal Services of Eastern Missouri. We are very proud of our organization with a long tradition of helping our members to help their clients. This web page is yet another way in which our Association is helping our members to help our clients. There are many ways in which this website accomplishes that goal but three important ones are:  first, by helping maintain and even raise the dignity and honor of the profession; second, by giving tools to our members to immediately help them in their practice; and third, by helping our members to better manage their membership in the Association in order to completely capture all benefits of membership even beyond those offered on our website.

First, maintaining and enhancing the professional dignity and honor has long been a goal of our organization even before we had a website to assist in this way. The website provides crucial access to justice for many non-members as well as members and in this way helps to enhance our profession even for those who are not practitioners. The website helps to provide access to lawyers in order to provide services and opinions through the Lawyer Referral Information Service. Indeed, the Lawyer Referral Information Service can even be seen as key in helping to provide the crucial opinion that is often appropriate that no lawyer is necessary. This website also helps us to promote our many philanthropic deeds and charities by our organization as a whole and our Young Lawyers Division. This work includes the Motion for Kids Christmas Party for children affected by the justice system, the Read Across America Project by our
Young Lawyers Division and the many other charitable ways which we as an Association and as individuals help enhance our professional reputation. Finally, we help maintain the professional dignity through this website by providing links for use by members of the public and press. There is a robust media section of our website in order to provide necessary legal information to reporters covering legal issues regardless of their reporting medium. The membership lists and leadership lists also form a valuable resource for members of the press to identify experts in particular substantative areas.

Our website is also important to our members because of the tools it provides to them to directly help their clients. For example, the website communicates to our members the many member benefits including substantial discounts on many law-related and general products and services related to the practice of law. Another tool for the benefit of our members is
forms for use by practitioners in particular situations including the standard forms for residential real estate used in nearly every transaction involving residential real estate in the St. Louis area. It was developed through the cooperation of BAMSL and the Realtors Association of St. Louis. Thirdly, the most important tool of our Association for our members is the access the website provides to the various subsections, committees and divisions. This organization is driven by the subsections, its sections committees and divisions and the web page enables our members to get the most current information about their practice of law in their practice area through the website access to the subsections.

Finally, our members are aided through this website to helping their clients even beyond the bounds of the internet. Although the internet provides an important component for our members to be able to help their clients, membership as a whole provides far more benefits for our members to help their clients. This website provides our members the opportunity to manage their relationship with the organization and other attorneys to derive the most out of their member benefits both from the website and beyond the website. This includes the ability to sign up for continuing legal education seminars, to join the organization as a whole to sign up for individual sections, to access membership rolls and in the near future will offer members the opportunity to see photos of other members to help them better remember and identify opposing and co-counsels as well as judges in the matter.

This small sampling of features helps demonstrate how our web page has become a crucial part of our Association and assists our members with their professional objectives of helping their clients. I hope that you will explore this web page fully whether you are a member of the public, a member of the Association, including members of the judiciary or a member of the press. Please enjoy the many benefits of our web page.

Sincerely,

Thomas Glick