Experiment to Cut Court Costs Begins : Defense Lawyers’ Group Brings Successful Formula Downtown

In an experiment aimed at slashing Los Angeles County’s skyrocketing costs for court-appointed attorneys for indigent defendants, a group of criminal defense lawyers will begin handling felony cases in the downtown Criminal Courts Building today.

The group, called the Alternate Defense Counsel, has received high marks for quality representation and cost savings during its two-year operation in the San Fernando Valley. There, the ADC has reduced by 60% the annual expenses for defending impoverished clients who cannot be represented by the Los Angeles County public defender’s office because of staff shortages or conflicts of interest.

Similar savings have been realized in other areas of Los Angeles County where the ADC has been handling misdemeanor and felony cases, county officials report.

The group has been criticized, however, for draining off business from private attorneys who rely on court appointments to build their practices. In response to pressure from the private Bar, the county has devised a dual program for the downtown courts that will continue to allow private defense attorneys to receive some court-appointed cases.

ADC attorneys will split an estimated 2,800 felony cases in the Superior Court’s downtown Central District this year with a panel of private lawyers who will receive court appointments on a rotating basis. The county now pays about $3.5 million to court-appointed attorneys to represent those defendants and hopes to reduce that outlay by $1 million under the bifurcated system, according to Frank S. Zolin, executive officer of the Superior Court.

The two groups will compete to determine which system can provide the highest quality representation at the lowest cost. The private panel is to begin operating in March under the direction of the Los Angeles County Bar Assn.

Billing Abuses Uncovered

The projects were approved by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in an attempt to stem the sharply rising cost of attorney’s fees for needy clients, which have risen to more than $27 million a year for adult and juvenile defendants, Zolin said. Audits have uncovered abuses by some court-appointed attorneys, who have overbilled the county for their services.

Since its inception in November, 1983, the ADC, which started as a one-year pilot project in the Valley, has expanded into Culver City, Beverly Hills, Inglewood, West Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Malibu, Burbank, Glendale, Calabasas and downtown.

Its original staff of 11 attorneys has swelled to 40 and will grow by 15 more this year with the expansion in the Central District courts, where the group has previously represented only misdemeanor defendants. The ADC maintains offices on Van Nuys Boulevard in Van Nuys and has acquired new facilities on Broadway downtown.

ADC attorneys are paid annual salaries ranging from $36,000 to $72,000, depending on their performance, and are not permitted to accept outside work. When the group was created, Executive Director Carl Jones required each of his attorneys to have a minimum of three years’ experience but has raised the standard to five years.

Although the public defender’s office’s represents 67% of needy defendants countywide, at an annual cost of $37.5 million, ADC and court-appointed lawyers are typically assigned to cases when the public defender has staff shortages or declares a conflict of interest. Conflicts of interest arise in multi-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.

By all accounts, the ADC has been a financial success.

The year before the ADC went into operation the county paid out more than $3 million in fees for court-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.

Its contract for the current operating year, which began Oct. 1, projects that ADC attorneys will represent an estimated 18,000 misdemeanor and felony defendants countywide for about $5 million.

Increased Operating Expenses

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

The group also has been praised for providing competent defense.

“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.”

At the same time, however, private defense attorneys maintain that, if indigent defendants are represented almost exclusively by the public defender’s office and the ADC, new attorneys who typically rely on court appointments to launch their careers will be run out of business.

Private defense attorneys in the Valley, with rare exceptions, can receive court appointments only in cases with more than two defendants. The public defender’s office will be appointed by a Municipal Court judge at the time of arraignment 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,” according to Joe Ingber, a criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles.

Overflow Cases

Because of the strong resistance from the private defense Bar, the county agreed to allow court-appointed attorneys to retain half of the overflow cases from the public defender in the downtown courts.

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

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

“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 significantly reduced.

“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.

Jones added, however, that he does not believe that 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 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.

Ingber argued, however, that cost should not be the sole factor in determining which group should receive an exclusive contract with the county.

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

If the pressure is to reduce costs, Ingber said, attorneys might increasingly encourage their clients to plead guilty, rather than go to trial.

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. Eventually, the quality of representation may suffer, they maintain.

‘Something Has to Give’

“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.”

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 from any conflicts of interest.

“You can’t use the source of income as the test,” Jones said. “We’re all paid out of the same pot--district attorneys, judges, police, public defenders, court-appointed attorneys and us.”

Screening Procedure Criticized

Several 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 individual’s own representations about whether he has a job, owns property or maintains a savings account, private attorneys argue.

“We’ve conditioned a large percentage of the public to say, ‘I need the public defender or the ADC,’ ” according to Blatt. “We need to get people back into the private sector where they belong and stop the government subsidy.”

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.”