The Reno attorney tripped over a hotel room chair while attending a conference in Utah and broke his neck.

Later that day he gave a lengthy presentation on the State Bar, listened to some speakers and went bobsledding.

Beesley brings that tenacity to everything he does - his creditors' rights practice at Lewis and Roca, the ski slopes of Utah, his family and his duties as head of the bar's Board of Governors.

Bruce Beesley STEVE MARCUS / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

As State Bar president you're in charge of the governing body for the lawyers in the state. There's about 9,500 lawyers in the state currently.

The state bar deals with things like discipline, admissions, CLE (Continuing Legal Education) - those are our primary functions. We also do things like IOLTA (Interest on Lawyers Trust Accounts), pro bono, academic admissions, that sort of thing. Although we don't necessarily regulate all those things, we have an interest in them.

And as president you set policy, you preside over the meetings, you interact with different groups - earlier this month I met with Barbara Buckley, who had some issues she wanted to talk about. I had a meeting the same day with the gentleman who is head of the family law section of the State Bar. I have this interview with you.

I get to meet monthly with the (state) Supreme Court. I get to go next month to the federal state bench committee meeting in Reno. A lot of that kind of stuff, passing information to and from groups and dealing with their issues.

I really had three goals when I started my term three months ago. One was to put forward, in this coming Legislature, the Modified Missouri Plan, which would change our selection system from directly electing judges to appointing them and having them stand for retention elections.

I had two other goals: One was a goal that didn't need achieving and the other I was just wrong on.

I wanted to make sure that we got rid of sections and committees within the State Bar that were inactive. But as we've contacted those various groups, everyone (expressed) interest in being active again. So I guess we've reactivated them as opposed to getting rid of them.

And one of the things I was concerned about from not well-informed complaints I had received was that the Supreme Court was taking too long to deal with discipline cases that were before it.

But when I looked at the statistics on it, (the justices) were on average dealing with those cases in about four months and since the briefing time takes at least two months and probably more than that, they were dealing with them in a very prompt fashion.

It took longer on disbarment cases, but those are more serious so it would make sense that they would take longer on them.

I have some kind of substitute goals. One of the things that a number of groups in the state are working on is to increase the amount of interest that banks pay on lawyer trust accounts.

It's been very low. It's been as low as a 10th of a percent. And the legal services committees, the Nevada Law Foundation, the Supreme Court and the State Bar are working on getting banks to voluntarily increase that to something that is indexed to a fed's fund rate or a LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) or something like that, minus about half a point, which in today's market is about 2 percent.

That will generate an awful lot more money for the pro bono projects and the poverty law projects in Nevada.

The Nevada Law Foundation gets 100 percent of the interest from the trust accounts lawyers hold for their clients. The foundation, which is the distributing agency, gets the money and the applications for grants. A portion of their overhead comes from that source, but most of it goes to legal aid and legal education service groups. None of that interest on those trust accounts goes back to the lawyers or other places. It's either used up in the process of allocating it or it goes directly to the programs.

About $360,000.

From the reports I get, it's gone real well. I guess the first indication to me was no one called me to complain about it, which is a pretty good bellwether of things.

There have been at least several hundred ads reviewed both in Northern and Southern Nevada. I can't tell you what the percentage is, but some percentage of those have been found to be misleading or materially misleading. And they have been sent to bar counsel either to get people to comply with them, which I think has happened in all cases, or they found they were not materially misleading, in which case people were free to use them.

The program we have now is essentially a review process. After you start using your ad you have a period of time to provide that ad to the reviewing committee. They look at it and make a decision of whether it is materially misleading. If the ad isn't materially misleading, you're allowed to continue to use it.

The old advertising program attempted to limit content and taste and that sort of thing. And a number of U.S. Supreme Court decisions said you can't regulate taste, you can't regulate some of those kinds of things. So we're basically restricting misleading claims. That's the standard.

They are lawyers who volunteer for the task. There are some restrictions: You can't review an ad submitted by a competitor. But barring that, any lawyer can go ahead and volunteer to do it. Really, it's a thankless job, but we have had no shortage of volunteers in the first year.

I think the current advertising rules are working pretty well. I don't foresee any current need for change. Obviously over time, as we become more familiar with them, there may be further needs, but in the first year they seem to me to be working pretty well.

I think he's doing a very good job. I think Dean White had a big position to fill with Dean (Richard) Morgan moving on. I mean, he was the founding dean of the law school.

The dean of the law school always sits as an ex officio member of the (Board of Governors) so I have a fair amount of exposure to them. Dean White is a different personality than Dean Morgan, but I think he's doing an excellent job. I think he is a great dean to follow Dean Morgan, and I hope he stays for a long, long time.

In terms of the funding, I think reducing funding for education, generally, in the state of Nevada is a very foolish thing to do. We typically rate last (in the nation) in terms of educational spending and achievement and that sort of thing, which we don't want.

If we're going to attract new businesses to Nevada we're going to have to have an educated population to work in those businesses that pay high paying jobs. And I think it's a real mistake to cut education. I think there are other things we can cut first.

And particularly with the law school, it's like any other educational institution, it needs money to pay its teachers, it needs money to pay its rent, it has to provide facilities to work in.

The legal community always has room for well-educated and capable new lawyers. Having them (educated locally) increases the chances that they're going to stay in the state.

I don't know exactly what sort of philosophy shift you'd be talking about, but if, for instance, you went to only a night school or part-time school it would take people longer to graduate, it would be less desirable for people who want to complete their degree in a shorter period of time.

If they weren't able to present all the programs they do now, their ABA (American Bar Association) certification might be in jeopardy because there are certain classes you have to have, a certain number of instructors full time, a certain number of books in your library or access to research resources. If those things are hurt they might lose their accreditation.

I would hope that wouldn't happen, and I hope the community generally, and the legal community, would step up if that happened.

I don't think it would, but if it did, it would be bad.

Having a good law school certainly helps the reputation of the community, the reputation of the state. It makes it easier to attract new businesses. Everybody complains about lawyers until they want one and they don't typically complain about their own.

It's also useful for Clark County Legal Services.

Clark County Legal Services has a program in conjunction with the law school where I think all the law students have to do a rotation through some kind of legal services. It's great for CCLS because it gets help where it needs it, it's great for the students because they get some practical experience.

Law students tend to be somewhat idealistic, and I think it's a good place for them to experience those kinds of practice areas that can be very rewarding, but can be very difficult to go into if you have $100,000 of student debt, and which are very difficult to do if you go to a firm that pays you enough to pay back that debt.

So I think it's a great experience for them and it's great for Clark County Legal Services.

You got me there. I have no idea.

We have more than 9,000 lawyers in the state, although some number of them are inactive. We may have 8,000 actively practicing lawyers in the state or 8,500 - I'm not exactly sure.

The big firms have changed the dynamic in one sense in that there is less local control over the law firms. But they've also been useful, I think, to the legal community because they provide in some cases higher quality of legal services, in some cases access to greater resources than existed when there weren't the out-of-state firms here.

I think there's a general trend to the nationalization of some kinds of law practices, and I think the existence of the big firms here tends to keep some of that money in town as opposed to going to New York to pay the lawyers from the firm that flies its lawyers in.

I think it makes more opportunities for graduates of the law school.

I think in other ways the demographic has changed, maybe not over 10 years, but over 30 years, in that there are a lot more women, a lot more minorities.

The State Bar has a diversity committee and my firm has a diversity committee, and I think there are genuine efforts being made to make the group of lawyers that practice law more diverse.

It's certainly not a perfect system, and I'm told that diversity of applications, outside of women, in law schools are down in the last decade.

It's a smaller community of lawyers. In Reno, there's probably 20 or 30 percent of the lawyers there are in Las Vegas. That figure may be off by 10 percent, I don't know. But it's a much smaller group.

You tend to know people more, although not nearly as much as when I first started 30 years ago.

The attraction of national firms to Reno has been a little slower than to Las Vegas, although the firm I'm with, Lewis & Roca, came in about three years ago. Two weeks ago Holland and Hart opened an office in Reno - it's a big firm out of Denver. There have been a couple of relatively small offices for firms like Armstrong Teasdale there already. And I think you'll see more of that.

I think what's happening in the law community is what happened a decade or two decades ago in the accounting community - more concentration of power in fewer and fewer firms.

In terms of changing the way things work, other than having a different set of resources to work with if you're a firm with 250 lawyers or a firm of 50 lawyers, I haven't seen that big a change. I have not seen that big a change in terms of lawyers from the branch offices of the firms coming in to practice, it tends to be the local firms practicing.

I don't know that as yet it has made a big difference in the practice in Northern Nevada except that lawyers who used to work for Hale Lane now work for Holland and Hart or Beckley Singleton lawyers now work for Lewis & Roca. That seems to be the change.

I think the elective system worked in Nevada for a long period of time. But I think that was more when Nevada was a small state.

When there were 25,000 people in Northern Nevada and four District judges, there was a pretty good chance that you or your neighbor or your brother or your friend knew the person who was the judge, and you had some legitimate input as to what that person was like.

With the size of the state today, which is what, 2.5 million people, certainly in Reno and Las Vegas, the vast majority of the people who are voting for judges don't know them. They've never met them. They've never met anybody who's met them. They don't know anybody who's met them. And the political process doesn't lend itself to people being exposed to those judges in a way that is going to let them have any real information about the person as to whether or not they're a good judge.

A billboard or a 30-second spot doesn't really tell you a lot. All of them are going to be tough on crime, all of them are caring and compassionate, all of them are independent and are not going to be influenced by anybody. But you don't get anything from that - any real information from that.

So I think our system is not good and I think the election of Elizabeth Halverson a couple of years ago is a pretty good indication of what can happen in the system when the system doesn't work.

A lot of the judges are very, very good. But the few elected judges who are not good can do a great deal of harm that is very hard to undo.

We recently have changed the way appointments are made in the state to an open system where everything except letters of recommendation or comments from the bar is public. You could go watch it, you can see the candidates interviewed, you can hear people discussing the candidates. I think that change to our system should make appointing judges a lot more acceptable to the voters. I would hope they would ultimately approve of it after the Legislature, I hope, approves it this term. But I think it is a better system in a larger state.

Plus it's not so expensive and you also don't take judges away from the work they're supposed to be doing while they have to run.

Certainly it's always possible if you have somebody who is sufficiently motivated. If they have the time, courts are public, you can go in and watch the judge, how the judge acts in court. Judicial demeanor is an important consideration.

You can, if you're sufficiently motivated, go to the courthouse and look in the files and read the judges' decisions. If you think the decision reads well and is well written, that will tell you something about that.

But I think it's difficult, practically, for people who are not in the court system to know them or to find out good information. If you have the time and you're sufficiently motivated, you can go do those things, and I think that would enable them to make a real good decision.

Most people who are running for judicial positions have never been a judge before. I don't have a problem with a lawyer running to be a judge, because almost nobody in our system is immediately made a judge. You start out as a lawyer and then you become a judge. So I don't think there's a problem with that.

But I think there's a problem with experience. We've had, in the past, people who have been out of law school a year or two running for judge. And I don't think they have sufficient experience at that point to sit as a judge.

There were some changes made a few years ago that required (a minimum amount of experience) before you could run for judicial positions. I think that has helped.

I hope not.

I think people have legitimate and principled opinions about whether or not we should elect or appoint judges, there's a difference of opinion on that. I think there are differences of opinion in the community on how poverty law programs should be funded - there's disagreements about how that should be done which are being discussed.

Those are sort of philosophical issues. I'm unaware of any major problems we have right now. I hope there are none. It would be nice to not have those.

I was a biology major in college, and so I'm not quite sure how I got interested in history. But I've sort of always been interested in history. My dad was also a lawyer and was a history major in college, so it's probably family related.

What really kind of got me interested was I went to a Continuing Legal Education program and they were talking about using voice mail. And they said if you want people to believe that you're going to pick up their voice-mail messages, you should change your message every day. So I started doing that - I'd give a weather report or try to talk about something else. Then I finally started doing "today in history this happened." And I got more interested in it.

It was kind of a way to express my interest in it. I'd try to come up with an interesting fact or if I'm really lucky, two disparate facts that happened on the same day.

In terms of the practice of law or my role in the State Bar, I think the real value to history is that history repeats itself - sometimes literally and sometimes with variations. But if you have a good knowledge of history, you can sometimes see that things are going the wrong way, or the right way, and react accordingly. I just think it gives you a better perspective on what's happening today if you have some sense of what happened in the past.

It actually is. The latest issue of Nevada Lawyer, our monthly magazine, is on environmental issues. And I wrote a president's column on environmental issues and one of the things I said in the column was that I was going to ask my firm and the State Bar to participate in the greening efforts. One of the things is that plastic bottles that you use for two hours in a meeting spend forever in a landfill. It's a much better use of resources to use the large delivered bottled water or purified water from the tap, and to use recycled-content paper and print on both sides, turn off your computer at night completely so it's not using power in standby mode. Those are things that are relatively easy. I turn off my computer now, I used to leave it on for years at a time. But I now turn it off every night. And I try to carpool more, although when I broke my neck and couldn't drive for 2 1/2 months it was easy, my wife would take me to everything - her office is across the street from mine.

I think that certain kinds of legal practices have more business when the economy is bad. I'm a creditors' rights lawyer and a bankruptcy lawyer and there's a lot more of the kind of business I do. There is supposedly a correlation between personal injury claims and unemployment because people are out of work and they're sitting around at home and they have some time to think about it they might decide that a claim they were going to bring, because they're out of work they are going to bring.

On the other hand, transactional types of things, permitting building things and financing things, those practices are down. I think there's more litigation in a down economy than a good economy because when it was easy to get credit and money was cheap, it was oftentimes easier just to buy your way out of the problem than to resolve the dispute you might have had with the person you're dealing with. So that's no longer available and there is more litigation.

I think the bar is doing well, I think the court system generally is doing well, I think the Supreme Court is doing very well. And I hope those things continue. Although one thing you learn from history is that things don't continue, they always change.