This article originally appeared in The Bar Examiner print edition, September 2016 (Vol. 85, No. 3), pp 2–3.
By Robert A. Chong
Aloha mai kākou! Greetings to all and welcome!
This is my first Letter from the Chair as I begin my journey as NCBE chair for the next year. This greeting in the Hawaiian language, which includes the word kākou, is very unifying. For many of us who are native to Hawaii, the salutation encourages the “language of we.” When conveyed in the spirit of the Hawaiian word lōkahi, which means harmony and balance, this greeting is intended to give you an idea of what to expect from my brand of leadership. I hope to promote additional solutions and alternatives to today’s challenges in bar admissions with a sense of lōkahi and compassion.
On behalf of the Board and myself, I extend our sincerest appreciation to our outgoing chair, the Honorable Tom Bice of Iowa, for the outstanding job he has done this past year. His Honor worked his tail off. Always in control of Board meetings, he exuded confidence while being fair to all in attendance. His detailed accounting of his activities to the Board, in the form of his itemized daily “time sheets” taken from his billing days in private law practice, reflects just how busy he was. The only items missing were the actual hours and minutes he worked along with his hourly rate! So impressive was his style of accounting that even Erica’s most recent reports to the Board were done in a similar format. Although this was a rigorous year of Board activities for Tom, he will be the first to admit that he enjoyed the entire experience, even risking his life to attend the Board’s meeting in Monterey this past May, traveling by train from Iowa to California and back. (His physician had ordered him not to fly due to the health risk it posed in light of a recent aggravated infection that had landed him in the emergency room. It’s a good thing the meeting was not held in Hawaii!)
At the conclusion of the recent NCBE/CBAA Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon, the Board gathered at a local restaurant for a lively roast of Judge Bice for his service as chair this past year. We also gave our kudos to Allison Drish of Texas, the outgoing chair of the Council of Bar Admission Administrators (CBAA), for her participation and contributions at every Board meeting this past year. Like Tom, Allison attended the funeral services for the late Beverly Tarpley, former NCBE Board chair and longtime chair of NCBE’s Editorial Advisory Committee, in Abilene, Texas, this past February—Allison on behalf of the CBAA, and Tom as a representative of NCBE. The Board also took this opportunity to welcome Mark Huntsberger of Florida, who succeeds Allison as CBAA chair. We also used this occasion to pass the chair’s gavel from Tom to me.
By way of a brief background, I was born and raised on Oahu, Hawaii, as were my parents. My grandparents were born and raised on Maui and later moved to Oahu in search of employment. My great-grandparents had immigrated to Hawaii from China as laborers and married into the local indigenous population. There were no written birth certificates kept back then, so a person’s ethnicity was often determined by what folks wanted it to be when the census taker came around. Hawaii remains a melting pot of many cultures and ethnicities in addition to our indigenous Hawaiian race, which can be traced to the Polynesians (Maoris of New Zealand).
I grew up living just two blocks from Waimanalo Beach, located on the windward side of Oahu, where I learned to fish, dive, and surf. During my early teens, my parents moved from our beach property to a 20-acre ranch/farm where we raised horses and cattle and farmed tropical plants for retail.
Like many locals, I am proud of my Hawaiian roots. To reconnect with my heritage, I trained as a dancer with a well-known master of hula kahiko (ancient pre-missionary–style hula) for many years following my graduation from law school on the mainland. I am now fully retired as a dancer, however. I credit the discipline of my past hula training as a positive distraction (both physically and mentally) from my early years of law practice. I joined an insurance defense litigation firm in Honolulu over 30 years ago, where I continue my law practice today.
My former law partner and mentor, Ronald Moon, left the law firm to become a state trial judge. He was soon appointed by Hawaii’s governor to serve as an associate justice on the Hawaii Supreme Court, eventually serving as its chief justice from 1993 until his retirement in 2011. While I had already been a member of Hawaii’s Board of Examiners since 1979, Justice Moon appointed me in 1993 to serve as its chair, a position I have held to the present.
As my tenure as NCBE chair begins, our profession and our relationship with the law schools are in a time of transition. Perhaps the most significant transition we face lies within the NCBE family over the selection of a new president, as Erica Moeser plans to retire at the end of 2017. The Board’s Search Committee, headed by Judge Bice, has secured the services of a professional and reputable legal recruiter and consultant to assist the committee in finding Erica’s successor. The search process is well under way. I feel grateful, blessed, and humbled to have this opportunity to serve as NCBE chair during Erica’s final year as our president.
While the task ahead of me is daunting, I am confident that I have the support of NCBE’s extremely capable staff and a very dynamic, experienced, and dedicated Board of Trustees to assist me. I have appointed or reappointed several past Board chairs to serve as members or to chair or co-chair some of NCBE’s committees. All of my appointees are extremely capable leaders with many years of bar admissions experience. I thank my colleagues on the Board in advance, along with our dedicated NCBE staff, for their continued support and excellent work as I meet the anticipated challenges that await me over the next year.
`O wau nō me ka mahalo. I am yours respectfully,
Robert A. Chong
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