Policing the Lawyers

The State Bar’s disciplinary system isn’t as bad as its detractors suggest, but, as State Bar President P. Terry Anderlini admits, it is “not one we can be proud of.”

Some overdue changes have been undertaken since the Legislature scared the Bar two years ago by threatening to relieve California’s lawyers of their traditional responsibility of policing themselves and turn the task over to a state commission. But, despite some progress, problems remain: Consumer complaints against lawyers languish for months, even years; Bar investigators and prosecutors are swamped by unmanageable workloads; the hundreds of volunteer attorneys who act as hearing officers, while hard-working, hand down inconsistent punishments, and too often an attorney who has misappropriated a client’s money or defaulted a case by missing a key deadline escapes with his license intact.

Now, prodded by a state-appointed watchdog, Bar monitor Robert C. Fellmeth, the board of governors of the State Bar has endorsed more far-reaching improvements in the system of discipline. The most important of these proposals calls for the establishment of both a tribunal of 11 administrative-law judges to decide disciplinary cases and a three-person appellate court to handle appeals; these judges, to be paid the same as the members of the state’s superior courts, would almost certainly help standardize and professionalize Bar discipline. The other reforms, including hiring more investigators and attorneys to prosecute cases and upgrading their pay, are equally laudable.

The hitch, of course, is how to pay for a first-rate disciplinary system. The Bar’s board of governors has asked the Legislature for the authority to raise Bar dues from $276 a year to as much as $470, with nearly all the increase earmarked for discipline and the client security fund, which compensates consumers for money lost through an attorney’s dishonesty. One would have thought that this would be a small price to pay for a system that would enforce the ethical standards of the legal profession, but there have been anguished yelps from lawyers. Several local Bar associations, including San Francisco’s, have rejected the dues increase, and others, like the Los Angeles County Bar Assn., have adopted a wait-and-see attitude. We know that not all of California’s 110,000 lawyers have prospered like those on television’s glossy “L.A. Law,” but resistance to a dues increase is unbecoming to the profession. Don’t lawyers realize that thousands of ordinary California workers whose paychecks are far smaller than their own pay more than $470 a year in union dues?

The Legislature’s approval is not a certainty, either. Already the reforms have been split into two measures--one covering the dues increase, the other the substantive changes--which raises the possibility that the new disciplinary system could be approved without providing the Bar with the financial wherewithal to pay for it. Several key legislators have started sniping at the proposal, too, in such a way that it is hard to tell whether their objections are to its substance or to its sponsors.

The dues increase might be pared a little, but it would be a shame if this much-needed overhaul of Bar discipline were torpedoed either through legislative whim or through the stinginess of some in the profession. Very few of California’s attorneys violate the standards of the profession, but those who do and who go unpunished tarnish the reputation of all their colleagues. Nobody is ever going to love lawyers, except maybe their spouses; the nature of the adversary system guarantees that they will always be at the center of disputes with enormous financial and emotional stakes--and one side will lose. But Californians could learn again to respect lawyers--if, this once, they demonstrate that they are willing to pay what it takes to police their own ranks.