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Court and Community News

Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024
BBO recruiting hearing committee members for 2025-27; SJC Performance Evaluation Program to include additional judges

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BBO recruiting hearing committee
members for 2025-27

The Board of Bar Overseers (BBO) encourages interested attorneys and members of the public across the commonwealth to apply for appointment as a volunteer hearing officer. 

The BBO seeks to maintain a broad-based geographic and demographic representation of attorneys and members of the public within its hearing officer pool, and strongly encourages applications from women, minorities, small-firm practitioners and individuals in public service. The BBO looks for lawyers with at least 10 years of legal experience, and members of the public who do not work in the legal field. The term of appointment is three years, and is renewable once.
 
Hearing committees sit in panels of three as fact-finding tribunals in disciplinary proceedings brought against respondent attorneys by the Office of Bar Counsel. Each hearing committee is drawn from the BBO's pool of over 100 hearing officers and includes:

  • Two lawyers
  • One non-lawyer
  • A chair, who is always a lawyer

BBO hearings are held under the Administrative Procedures Act, so while they are not as rigid as court hearings, they are formal, subject to certain evidentiary requirements and recorded by a stenographer. The committees hear testimony, take evidence and make adjudicatory rulings. Hearings average two to three days. Once the hearing is over and the parties have submitted requests for findings of fact and conclusions of law, the committee, aided as needed by an assistant general counsel to the BBO, writes a hearing report, in which it finds facts, draws conclusions of law and, if it has found misconduct, recommends a sanction to the BBO. 
 
Interested attorneys (with 10 years or more experience) should submit a statement of interest and a resume. Members of the public (excluding paralegals and those employed in a legal-related field) must complete the application here. All documents should be submitted on or before Nov. 1 by email to hcr@massbbo.org or by mail to:

Bernice Addonizio
Board of Bar Overseers
One Beacon Street, 10th Floor
Boston, MA 02108

Contact Addonizio at (617) 728-8703 or email hcr@massbbo.org with inquiries only.

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SJC Performance Evaluation Program to
include additional judges

The Supreme Judicial Court previously announced the resumption of the Judicial Performance Evaluation Program, which allows members of the bar, court employees and jurors to provide anonymous, confidential feedback about judges both to the judges themselves and to court leadership. In addition to judges who sat in any Essex County Court, any Middlesex County District Court, the Boston Municipal Court or the Chelsea District Court, judges who sat in Juvenile Court in Barnstable County, Dukes County or Nantucket County in the last two years will also be evaluated. 

In October, attorneys will receive an email directing them to an encrypted website where they can anonymously respond to questionnaires about judges before whom they were scheduled to appear in the preceding two years. Judges will not receive copies of completed questionnaires. Instead, responses submitted about each judge will be aggregated into a single confidential evaluation report. Judges will discuss these evaluation reports with their chief justice with the goal of fostering professional development and self-improvement.