Larry McDougal Sr. was elected president-elect of the State Bar of Texas. He's a senior attorney at the Larry McDougal firm in Richmond, Texas. Photo courtesy of the State Bar of Texas.

Texas attorneys have elected Larry McDougal as the next president-elect of the State Bar of Texas.

Out of nearly 24,300 ballots, McDougal won 52 percent of the vote while his opponent, Jeanne “Cezy” Collins, won 47 percent, according to a Texas Bar news release. McDougal will be president-elect for one year beginning June 13, and then he'll serve as bar president from 2020 to 2021.

McDougal was a bar board member from 2012 to 2015 and he still serves on the bar's Continuing Legal Education Committee and as a grievance committee chairman. In addition to teaching legal ethics to lawyers around Texas, he practices criminal law, along with his son, as the senior attorney of the Law Office of Larry McDougal in Richmond. He earned his law degree in 1990 from South Texas College of Law Houston. Earlier in his life, he was a police officer, firefighter and assistant district attorney.

McDougal said that after traveling every day all over the state to meet attorneys and talk with them about the bar, he's stunned to win the election and it's hard to believe that his campaign is over.

“I've got several things I want to do. I'm looking for things that are broken,” he said.

For example, as the chairman of his local grievance committee, McDougal said he sees many “bad grievances” without merit that people file against attorneys, which leads to much stress on the lawyers' part. If the bar required clients to swear to and notarize their complaints before filing them, McDougal said it would cut down on false grievances.

He'd also like to staff up the bar's ethics hotline so that attorneys seeking help with tricky ethics questions could receive same-day call-backs from people with answers. McDougal said it's problematic that calls to the ethics hotline are not currently confidential, but instead, subject to open records requests.

Among other things, McDougal said he'd work quickly with the Texas Lawyers' Assistance Program to create and offer CLE courses about suicide prevention for attorneys. The U.S. Air Force implemented a suicide prevention program that has cut suicides among airmen, McDougal said, and the State Bar should model a program based on that to educate lawyers about how to get help and reduce the stigma of seeking help.

Collins, who ran against McDougal, didn't immediately return a call seeking comment.

Attorneys also voted to elect directors to the Texas Bar board, including:

• Christina M. Davis, Tyler, District 2
• Kate Bihm, Conroe, District 3
• Diane St. Yves, Houston, District 4, Place 1
• Michael K. Hurst, Dallas, District 6, Place 1
• Rebekah Steely Brooker, Dallas, District 6, Place 5
• Jason Smith, Fort Worth, District 7, Place 2
• Yolanda Cortes Mares, Temple, District 8
• Adam Schramek, Austin, District 9, Place 2
• Santos Vargas, San Antonio, District 10, Place 2
• David Sergi, San Marcos, District 15

In the election for the Texas Young Lawyers Association, Britney Harrison of Dallas will become president-elect after winning 59 percent of the votes, compared with 40 percent for her opponent, Tim Newman of Dallas. Details of the TYLA board of directors election are available online at texasbar.com/election.