Vermont Bar Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2 Vermont Bar Journal, Spring 2017, Volume 43, No. 1 | Page 39

TC: Well, having had the pleasure of
serving with you on the Vermont Bar Foun-
dation Board, I know you remain active with
it to this day. What would you say is the
most important thing for readers to know
about the Vermont Bar Foundation?
JD: I think that the growth of the Bar
Foundation in the last few years, in partic-
ular, has been very, very important to the
profession in general. Certainly, in terms of
access to justice in the state, it has turned
into an active and very effective organiza-
tion. When it started, IOLTA was starting to
catch hold around the country, and the VBA
leadership got interested in it and created
the Bar Foundation; it was kind of an ad-
junct to the VBA. Of course the amount of
money coming from IOLTA was much less
than it is now, because it was entirely vol-
untary in the first years. It grew pretty slow-
ly, but it became a very different organiza-
tion when universal IOLTA came in and all
of a sudden, it became a much more impor-
tant financing vehicle for legal assistance
for Vermont Legal Aid, Law Line and the
Vermont Law School Legal Clinic. Then we
started the practice where the Board mem-
bers are elected from the different districts,
and I think the Board became much stron-
ger and more active. Then along came the
fundraising efforts and the various projects
like the Poverty Law Fellow. So it has really
grown to be a very effective tool to improve
access to justice in this state,. It will hope-
fully become stronger and stronger.
TC: For the next 30 years.
JD: Yes.
TC: I had the pleasure of also serving
with you on a couple other committees,
including the Technology Oversight Com-
mittee and Vermont Rules of Electronic Fil-
ing Committee, so I know you have a very
strong interest in technology. You must be
happy about the Next Generation case
management/e-filing project that’s now go-
ing on.
JD: Yes, of course. I think achieving
that is very important. It’s a great tool, but
most of the decisions really aren’t about the
technology, they’re about how you do your
business and how you organize yourself in
order to do business well. There are tre-
mendous opportunities from this technolo-
gy, but changing the way you do business
in the Vermont Judiciary takes a lot of com-
mitment and a lot of hard work. Change
does not come easily, as you well know, to
this institution. I suppose if I am leaving
with concerns about what is, as you say, a
good news story, it’s whether we will do the
hard work of turning it into the asset that I
www.vtbar.org
think it well could be.
TC: To switch gears a little bit, what ad-
vice would you give to a young person
thinking about going into law as a career.
JD: You know one of the things we used
to do, but don’t anymore, is to give our little
homilies from the bench to newly admitted
lawyers. So I would think about tha