Lynn Mounsey, the executive director of the Spokane County Bar Association, says the nearly 1,000-member organization started its annual membership drive this month with a greater emphasis on luring younger attorneys into its ranks.

Mounsey says locally, and nationwide, the legal profession is seeing vast numbers of attorneys entering retirement.

“There’s a silver tsunami of attorneys who are gradually and continuously aging out of their practices,” she says.

Meanwhile, law school enrollments across the country are in decline. The American Bar Association says U.S. law firms were hit especially hard with layoffs during the Great Recession, and the profession has yet to rebound fully.

At Gonzaga University’s School of Law, peak enrollment for first-year law students in the last decade occurred in 2007, with 207 students.

However, that number since slipped to 132 in 2012, 108 in 2013, 128 in 2014, and 127 in 2015, Gonzaga law school data shows. Final enrollment numbers for Gonzaga’s 2016 first-year law class will be released next month.

Mounsey, who is 58 and a veteran attorney, says unlike their veteran counterparts, young attorneys are more inclined to use social media, keep nontraditional hours, and work remotely.

As a result, she says she sees less mentoring of younger attorneys by their older peers than at any time in her nearly three decades of practicing law.

“Not only do we want to grow our young membership base, but we also want to create those opportunities for older attorneys to offer their knowledge and expertise,” Mounsey says.

Spokane’s 109-year-old bar association was established to serve as a resource for both the legal profession and the community. Today, approximately 40 percent of its members are sole practitioners, Mounsey says.

The bar association employs seven people, six of them full time. Most of the staff works on the fourth-floor of an annex to the Spokane County Courthouse, at 1100 W. Mallon, in barely 1,000 square feet of space.

A large part of annual membership dues, ranging from $15 for law school students to $145 for general members, helps cover the costs for Continuing Legal Education credits for attorneys, as required by the Washington State Bar Association, Mounsey says.

Last October, the bar association’s board of trustees and the board of directors for the Volunteer Lawyers Program hired Mounsey to replace former executive director Penny Youde, who resigned to pursue another position. Youde was the bar association’s executive director for 16 years prior to her departure.

The Volunteer Lawyers Program was founded in 1985 and is a nonprofit organization under the umbrella of the county bar association. The program, located at 1704 W. Broadway, is funded through the Legal Foundation of Washington and serves low-income residents in Spokane, Adams, Ferry Grant, Lincoln, Pend Oreille, Stevens, and Whitman counties.

Upon being named executive director, Mounsey says she wanted to see more attorneys donating free legal help to the community.

Residents who qualify for pro bono assistance earn below 200 percent income of federal poverty guidelines, which is $23,540 for an individual. Seniors above the age of 60 are eligible without income restrictions in most cases, Mounsey says.

In 2015, the Volunteer Lawyers Program had almost 1,650 volunteer hours donated at a value of $400,000 for almost 1,600 cases. This year, through the first eight months, volunteers have assisted in more than 1,200 cases with almost 1,100 pro bono hours logged, Mounsey says.

Roughly 80 percent of those cases are family-law cases, related to marital dissolutions and child custody disputes, she says.

Mounsey says the bar association historically has been one of the more respected in the state of Washington. 

“It’s a tremendously collegial association, and our reputation is one of our biggest assets. We want to increase our role in the community and let people know we can be a resource for their legal needs. It’s about helping the person as opposed to their paperwork,” she says.

At the beginning of April, the bar association reached out to the American Bar Association and requested it conduct an internal evaluation of the organization.

“We’re expecting the results of the audit to come back to us very soon. We want to make sure we’re doing all we can to maximize our efforts to both the legal and broader community,” Mounsey says.

She says her office has recently started efforts to update the bar association’s website and establish a more complete database with membership information.

Before taking over as its executive director, Mounsey was an assistant attorney general in the Spokane office of the Washington state Attorney General’s Office from 2006 to 2015, handling cases for the state departments of Health and Welfare, and Labor and Industries, and Medicaid fraud.

Prior to that, she was a deputy prosecuting attorney in the Spokane County Prosecutor’s Office and worked in the major crimes and special assault unit from 2001 to 2006.

A Spokane native, she earned her law degree from the Gonzaga University School of Law in 1987.

“I absolutely love this job,” Mounsey says of her role as the bar association’s executive director. “I find it very fulfilling because it gives me an opportunity to really focus our efforts on truly helping the community.”