Cost-Cutting Legal Defense Team Expands : Van Nuys Alternate Defense Group to Tackle Downtown Felony Cases

It started as a one-year pilot project in the San Fernando Valley, an experiment to determine whether a private group of attorneys could reduce the skyrocketing costs of representing indigent defendants at taxpayer expense.

That was in November, 1983, when 11 lawyers left their jobs and gambled on the Alternate Defense Counsel of Van Nuys, believing, in the words of Executive Director Carl Jones, that the project “simply could not fail.”

Two years later, the ADC, as it is called, has expanded into Calabasas, Burbank, Glendale, Malibu, Culver City, Beverly Hills, Inglewood, West Los Angeles, Santa Monica and downtown Los Angeles.

In January, the ADC, which functions as a second county public defender’s office in those areas, will begin handling felony cases downtown, where the group has previously represented only misdemeanor defendants.

No Outside Work

Its staff of attorneys, who are paid annual salaries ranging from $36,000 to $72,000, depending on their performance, has soared to 40 and will grow by another 15 next year with the addition of an estimated 1,400 cases downtown. The full-time attorneys are not permitted to accept any outside work, Jones said.

The ADC, which operates under a year-to-year contract with the county, is one of several projects approved by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in an attempt to stem the sharply rising costs of attorneys’ fees for needy clients, which have risen to more than $25 million a year.

A second group, composed of private attorneys who will continue in their own law practices but will receive court-appointed cases on a rotating basis, also will begin operating downtown next year.

By all accounts, the ADC has proven a financial success. At a time when the court system has come under attack for tolerating overbilling practices by some court-appointed defense attorneys, the ADC has slashed by 60% the cost of representing clients who are too poor to hire their own lawyers but who cannot be represented by the public defender’s office.

The ADC and court-appointed lawyers are assigned to cases when the public defender’s office has staff shortages or declares a conflict of interest. Conflicts of interest arise in multiple-defendant cases because each defendant must be represented by his own attorney, and the public defender’s office has been interpreted to be one attorney.

The year before the ADC went into operation, the county paid more than $3 million for appointed attorneys to handle 7,000 misdemeanor and felony cases at the Van Nuys and San Fernando courthouses. During its first year, the ADC represented the same number of defendants but reduced the outlay to $1 million, according to a county budget analyst.

Jones said that although expenses will increase as the organization expands, he believes the ADC can continue to operate at half the cost the county previously paid for court-appointed counsel.

Its contract for the current operating year, which began Oct. 1, projects that ADC attorneys will represent 15,832 defendants in the Valley, Westside and Glendale-Burbank areas at a cost of $2.5 million.

The group has won much praise for providing competent representation at a low cost. When the group was created, Jones required each of his attorneys to have a minimum of three years’ experience but has raised the standard to five years.

“They’ve done a high-quality job,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Norman F. Montrose, who works at Van Nuys Superior Court. “The level of representation is outstanding.”

Criticized by Bar

At the same time, however, the group has been criticized by the private bar for hindering the efforts of young defense attorneys to build successful practices.

If indigent defendants are represented almost exclusively by the public defender’s office and the ADC, as is the case today in the Valley, new attorneys who typically rely on court appointments to launch their careers will be run out of business, the argument goes.

Private defense attorneys in the Valley, with rare exceptions, can only receive court appointments in cases with more than two defendants. The public defender’s office will be appointed by a municipal judge to represent the first defendant, and the ADC will be assigned the second.

If such a system is adopted countywide, “people will get out of criminal law,” Joe Ingber, a criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles, said.

Jones, who left a 16-year criminal defense practice to head the ADC, acknowledges the need to retain a strong, active defense bar.

‘Novel Procedures’

“Private lawyers bring in fresh ideas, ingenious approaches and new and novel procedures,” Jones said. “You don’t get as much burnout when a private attorney handles an occasional criminal case, versus attorneys who do criminal work five days a week, all year long.”

Jones said he believes, however, that the ADC has demonstrated that the costs of public legal representation can be reduced significantly.

“The worst that could happen is that private attorneys will learn how to do the job cheaper and will get all the business back,” Jones said.

Because of the strong resistance from the private defense bar, the ADC will face its most challenging year in 1986, when the group will square off with a competing panel of court-appointed attorneys downtown to determine which can provide the best quality representation while holding the ceiling on costs.

The defense-bar panel, which Ingber helped establish, assigns cases on a rotating basis to qualified attorneys throughout the county at an average hourly rate of $50 for the time they spend preparing cases and representing clients in court.

The two groups will split about 2,800 felony cases downtown, according to Frank Zolin, executive officer of the Los Angeles Superior Court. The county pays about $3.5 million to court-appointed attorneys to represent those defendants and hopes to reduce that cost by $1 million under the dual program, Zolin said.

At the end of the year, the county may opt to contract with one group exclusively, continue to divide the cases or go to another system altogether, Zolin said.

Jones said he does not believe the bar panel can do the job as cost-effectively. ADC attorneys, he explained, receive a flat salary and compensatory time off, rather than overtime pay. The bar panel, Jones said, can regulate the hourly rate paid out to attorneys but cannot control the number of hours for which each attorney bills the county for handling a case.

“I don’t think they have a snowball’s chance of coming close to us in terms of savings,” Jones said.

Cost Not Sole Factor

Ingber argued, however, that cost should not be the sole factor in selecting which group should take overflow cases from the public defender’s office.

“I philosophically think you should not decide that one (group) is $8 an hour less and therefore that’s better,” Ingber said.

Some other private attorneys argue that, although the ADC has represented clients effectively to date, pressure to reduce operating expenses will result in overworked attorneys, burdened by heavy caseloads.

“I don’t know if there’s a final judgment on ADC yet,” said Barry F. Hammond, a defense attorney who works in the Valley.

“Carl Jones is one of the finest criminal defense attorneys I have ever seen. But a lot of his attorneys are overloaded. Something has to give somewhere.”

Attorney James E. Blatt, a past president of the San Fernando Valley Criminal Bar Assn., said he is concerned that the expansion of the ADC will result in the “socialization of the criminal defense system, where everybody works for the government.”

But Jones responded that the county’s primary consideration should be whether the defendant is being represented by an independent lawyer “concerned exclusively for that defendant, as compared to the co-defendant.”

Confidential Information

ADC attorneys, Jones said, do not share office space, files or confidential information with their counterparts in the public defender’s office and are, therefore, free of any conflicts of interest.

Several Valley attorneys also complained that the county procedure for screening defendants to determine if they are truly indigent is lax and allows many to be represented at taxpayer expense when they should be paying their own bills.

Although the county employs individuals to screen defendants, the process usually relies on the defendant’s own representations about whether he has a job, owns property or maintains a savings account, private attorneys argue.

Helped Expose Abuses

Even those attorneys acknowledged, however, that the ADC has helped expose abuses in the system of fees paid to court-appointed attorneys.

Before a uniform fee structure was adopted earlier this year, judges throughout the county paid varying hourly rates to attorneys, and a large percentage of court appointments were going to a small segment of the legal profession, Jones said. In addition, some attorneys were billing the county for 20-hour days and for court appearances on holidays, when the courts were closed.

“There were abuses, but it was a minute amount,” Jones said. “An awful lot of good, highly ethical attorneys were hurt.

“The private bar has lost some money, but I think they will concede that we do a good job.”