NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF BOND LAWYERS
Voice from the Past
Chapter 10
When I first started in the practice of law in 1950, the
only way to learn municipal bond
law was by the apprentice method. There was no National
Association of Bond Lawyers. The
Local Government Law Section of the American Bar Association put
on a program in connection
with the ABA annual meeting, but half the program was for
experienced bond lawyers and the
remaining half for lawyers in other areas, such as zoning or
labor negotiations. In Texas and in
Oklahoma the State Attorney General was required to approve all
bonds issued by local
governmental bodies; nearly all Texas bond lawyers and most
Oklahoma bond lawyers learned the
work in those offices under assistant attorneys general who
learned from the established bond
lawyers in the major financial centers. I arrived near the end
of the time when bonds of
municipalities in Texas could be sold out-of-state only with the
opinion of Chicago or New York
bond counsel -- a situation that, at that time, caused Chapman
and Cutler to have more business in
Texas than in Illinois.
Bonds were issued in much smaller amounts and less often in those
days, and it was not
economically feasible for a law firm to spend the time required
to look up all the necessary law
and get the forms from the public records for the fees it could
charge on the five or six bond
issues per year that it might get if well-connected and lucky.
Law firms that represented
municipalities in other matters were in a better position to
learn the law, and they did so pretty
much by apprenticing themselves to the established financial
center bond lawyers. The local
lawyers would draft the papers (our fee was increased by $150
when we did), and in time they
established libraries of forms and knew which laws to look out
for.
The law you had to know was not just that in the statutes
pertaining to local governments.
Significant laws appeared in various other parts of the compiled
statutes where the inexperienced
would be unlikely to find them. I recall that Arizona required
all municipal bond issues to be
offered to the State Industrial Commission before being sold to
the public. The pertinent statute
was compiled under "Workmen's Compensation" -- not an area that
one searching municipal
bond law would normally dig into. When working on a bond issue
of a State in which our firm
had not previously approved bonds of a given type, I was brought
up to go through the compiled
statutes page by page to see what was there. That was not so bad
in smaller States, but all those
California codes were daunting. I may have cheated a little when
it came to the code dealing with
domestic relations, and relied on examining the table of contents
and the index. I fondly recall
finding my favorite pair of laws in Florida. The law governing
holidays declared election day to
be a holiday. The law governing elections declared that no
election could be held on a holiday.
You also had to know the case law, most, but not all, of which
could be found in the
annotations to the statutes. Looking through the digests meant
not limiting the search to
"Municipal Corporations" but also checking out "Counties,"
"Schools and Schools Districts,"
"Waters and Water Courses," and those areas dealing with sewers,
elections, newspapers (for the
publishing of notices), holidays, and others. A case on bonds
for a purpose in one of those areas
would be precedent for a case on bonds in other areas as well.
Of course, the apprentice system in our firm made it unnecessary
for each young lawyer to
thoroughly search all the law himself; he was told which laws and
cases were pertinent to those
types of bonds in those States that the firm had previously
approved. He was to become
thoroughly familiar with each of them.
It was in this context that the advance sheets from all regions
of the country were
circulated to the lawyers in the firm's municipal department. A
list of their names was stamped on
the front cover of each advance sheet, and when the person ahead
of me finished looking at one,
he crossed out his name and passed it on to me to read and pass
on to the lawyer whose name
was below mine. Paul Cutler got the sheets first, and wrote on
the cover of each, in red, the page
number of each case he considered significant. That did not
relieve me of the responsibility of
finding others he may have missed. One or two lawyers didn't get
around to reading some
advance sheets for months or years, leaving those lower on the
list temporarily in the dark about
many new cases.
When Chuck Carlson was the low man on the list, he got first-hand
experience with the
frustrations of this system. Later, he did something about it.
He established Bond Case Briefs.
(For the benefit of any non-bond-lawyer reading this, Bond Case
Briefs gives succinct summaries
of all cases published in the advance sheets that might be of
interest to bond lawyers.) By this
time, Chuck was in his own firm, approving bond issues in
competition with Chapman and Cutler.
There was some feeling that we should not be "promoting the
competition" by subscribing to this
publication; this feeling was expressed most loudly by those who
took the longest to finish reading
and passing on the advance sheets. Rather than confront those
dinosaurs, I quietly subscribed to
Bond Case Briefs in my own name, and passed on my obsolete
advance sheets even more
promptly than before. No one chose to forbid my continuing to
subscribe, and in time the other
members of the municipal department realized that the members of
other law firms around the
country were learning of new cases before they were because the
other lawyers didn't have to
wait for the advance sheets to trickle down to them. Then the
firm subscribed.
Bond Case Briefs not only provided a significant professional
service. but also started a
national sense of community among the various bond lawyers. By
this time nearly all former
apprentice firms were selling bonds on their opinions alone, and
whatever sense of community
resulted from the inter-firm apprentice relationships waned,
though there was a feeling of
community amongst the bond lawyers in some of the States that had
more than one such firm. In
addition, many firms not previously in the "legitimate" bond
business were getting into industrial
development bond work and thus becoming part of the community,
whether the older firms liked
it or not.
Purported seminars on municipal bond topics were beginning to be
produced in various
major cities by organizations such as the Practising Law
Institute, Institute for Continuing Legal
Education, and Executive Enterprises. They were expensive and
served both to publicize the
expertise of the members of the faculties and to provide
instruction on topics that were current
months before, when the seminars were put together. Also, they
were produced as lectures rather
than in the give-and-take format that is better among
professionals engaged in a common effort to
learn and share.
In time, Chuck, Fred Kiel, and others concluded that the
community of bond lawyers
needed something cheaper and better. They were right. In 1976
they founded the Bond
Attorneys' Workshop. The huge and growing attendance at the
Workshop has demonstrated their
wisdom, as has the reduced number of attempts by others to
compete. The Workshop quickly
and strongly furthered the sense of community among bond lawyers
so that by 1979 the National
Association of Bond Lawyers became both inevitable and essential.
Manly W. Mumford