New State Bar of Texas President Randy Sorrels plans to focus his term on projects to help lawyers' everyday needs.

As attorneys at the State Bar Annual Meeting in Austin on June 14 feasted on a lunch of steak, vegetables and chocolate mousse, Sorrels spoke to them about his plans for family leave continuance rules, a statewide vacation letter, an e-filing consistency project and more.

Texas Lawyer sat down with Sorrels, partner in Houston's Abraham, Watkins, Nichols, Sorrels, Agosto & Aziz, to learn more about his plans. Here are his answers, edited for brevity and clarity.

I was interested to hear about your family leave continuance plans. What is the problem you are seeing in the legal profession that needs this solution?

It affects both men and women, but it affects women in a disproportionate manner because they know they are going to carry this baby, hopefully for nine months, and they are looking at their calendars. Every one of them looks to see when that due date month is—what's going on there. They say, 'I'm trying to keep a practice. I want to be a lawyer throughout this. There's all these things I have to juggle.' We want to put certainty in their lives that if they have been the lead lawyer on a case and they have been doing all the work, that they will get that relief for the birth or adoption—automatic, no discretion by unfriendly counsel or an unfriendly judge.

During your speech, you got a lot of applause when you were talking about a statewide vacation letter. What's the issue that you want to fix?

I practice in Harris County and I can file a vacation form—It's very simple with the county. But if I also have cases in other counties, which I do, I have to figure out their process and steps and go through all of those. It takes a significant amount of time and calendaring and making sure I do everything right in those courts and counties to have vacation time properly preserved and protected. The idea is that if I can send one letter through a central portal—and there's a way to do that—and be recognized universally throughout the 254 courts, it saves the lawyer and their law firm and their staff all this time of worrying, 'Did I get it right?' for each particular county. It's a common-sense solution to problems we are all dealing with in the month of June. Most people take vacations in the summer.

Another of your projects aims for e-filing consistency across Texas. What's your idea to tackle that problem?

You know, the PACER system was thrust upon the nation and I'm sure there was a lot of resistance, because we are all resistant to change. Within six months everyone was saying, 'This is great.' The lawyers of Texas are like, 'Just give us PACER and we'd be thrilled.' We are making incremental steps slowly, but we need to pick up the pace and understand it really is a daily dilemma for a lot of lawyers and law firms. We are going to ask the Supreme Court to continue to advanced programs. There is a software program they are working on that since the 254 counties can't agree on what to do, the software program is supposed to take the document and decipher that particular county's filing rules and spit it to them in their particular way. Let's get this fixed once and for all, sooner rather than later.