I have served on the Board of Directors of the Texas Employment Lawyers Association.
The lawyers who do this work
There are not many lawyers in Texas who represent employees. The ones who do tend to know each other, and TELA is one of the places where that happens.
I founded this firm in 2001 and have represented employees, never employers, ever since. My service on the TELA Board of Directors shows up as one line on my bio page, in a list of associations, with no explanation attached to it. This is the explanation.
What is TELA?
The Texas Employment Lawyers Association was founded in 1992. It describes itself as the voluntary bar association of Texas attorneys who represent people rather than companies, created, in its own words, “to protect and expand the legal rights and opportunities of all Texas workers as well as to build and strengthen the community of lawyers who represent them.”
In practice it does two things. It promotes legislative protection of worker rights across the state and supports judicial enforcement of those rights through advocacy and litigation. And it keeps a scattered group of independent lawyers in contact with one another, which matters in a state this size. It also publishes a yearbook of attorney hourly rates in Texas, which sounds dull until you are the one trying to prove a reasonable fee to a federal judge.
The National Employment Lawyers Association, a national association of lawyers who represent workers, lists TELA among its Texas affiliates. NELA describes each affiliate as an independent organization with its own leadership and its own membership.
What membership signifies, and what it does not
Membership in TELA is not an award. Nobody nominated me. No committee reviewed my record and picked me out for anything. It is a voluntary bar association, and a Texas lawyer joins it through an application process.
I say that plainly because legal advertising is full of logos arranged to look like honors. This one is not an honor. It is a statement about who you work for, and the criterion is the one in the association’s own description of itself. You represent people rather than companies.
What is worth something is the work. Employment law in Texas moves through the legislature and through the appellate courts, and most of that movement happens quietly, years before it ever reaches anybody’s case. Lawyers who represent workers have to be in those rooms. If they are not, the only people in the room are the ones who represent companies.
That is why I gave time to it. Not for the line on the bio page. For the rooms.