Henry "Hank" M. Greenberg. (Photo: David Handschuh/ALM)

New York State Bar Association President Henry "Hank" M. Greenberg opened an historic gathering of the association's governing body on Saturday with a message of adaptation and resilience, amid what he called a "public health crisis without parallel in American life."

"The coronavirus is an inflection point from which there is no turning back," he told 207 members of the NYSBA's House of Delegates, who for the fist time met remotely to vote on a slate of policy proposals. "The profession that we are going to look at when we get to the other side of the crisis, in significant respects, is going to look different than it did before the crisis."

Greenberg's remarks, in the final quarterly address of his one-year term as NYSBA president, highlighted the challenges facing New York attorneys as they navigate a legal and professional landscape that has already been fundamentally altered as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, which has shuttered large sectors of the U.S. economy and claimed more than 12,000 American lives, as of Tuesday afternoon.

But it also made good on Greenberg's vision from June of building a "virtual bar center" to consolidate the NYSBA's resources on a single digital platform, accessible to members across the world at the click of a mouse.

"While the state and nation are in the throes of a historic public health crisis, our voice has never been needed more than now," Greenberg, shareholder at Greenberg Traurig, said in a statement.

"This meeting demonstrated the power and potential of that vision," he said.

Since the platform's launch in early March, the NYSBA has transformed its existing online infrastructure into "COVID-19 resource centers," to provide real-time information and services to attorneys and firms. The bar association has also partnered with the New York State Court's Office of Court Administration to expand pro bono legal services when the virus subsides, and is working to help small firms and solo practitioners who are expected to be particularly hard hit by the crisis.

The April 4 meeting, held via video conference, was the largest-ever gathering of the House of Delegates, Greenberg said, rivaled only by a 2005 convocation, where the body debated the merits of same-sex marriage.

On Saturday, delegates from across the state met for over four and a half hours and adopted reports on the state's rural justice disparities, the Uniform Bar Exam and legal questions surrounding automated vehicles.

Though it went longer than the usual quarterly meetings in Albany, Greenberg said there were "no significant glitches," and members were able to make comments and debate the proposals remotely. The total turnout, he said, more than doubled the amount needed for a quorum.

In his remarks, Greenberg said he avoided the "valedictory" tone that typically accompanies an outgoing president's final remarks to the House of Delegates, and instead vowed to continue working in the face of the emergency.

"Leadership is the glory of this profession. It is who we are, it is what we do. It is in our DNA," he said. "And never before in the history of the legal profession, maybe in American history, has the public needed the voice of lawyers more than today. These are difficult time; these are dark times. But I submit there has never been a better time to be a New York lawyer or an American lawyer."

Greenberg, whose term is scheduled to expire May 31, is set to be succeeded by President-elect Scott M. Karson of Lamb & Barnosky in June.

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