State Bar Accepts ’86 Dues Bill, Braces for Inquiry

Embattled California State Bar officials on Tuesday grudgingly accepted the Legislature’s stopgap measure permitting collection of 1986 dues from the state’s 90,000 lawyers, but braced for a full-scale inquiry into their budget, discipline and even future existence.

The bill enables the Bar, which admits and disciplines all California lawyers, to collect mandatory dues at 1985 levels--$180 for attorneys with three or more years of experience, $115 for those with one to three years, and $100 for new lawyers. It also includes a cost-of-living increase of up to $10 per lawyer.

Gov. George Deukmejian is expected to sign the compromise measure passed Monday by an Assembly vote of 56 to 7 and a Senate vote of 35 to 2.

“There is an up side and a down side,” said Bar President David Heilbron of San Francisco. “The up side is there is a bill and we will survive. . . . The down side is we will have $2.5 million to $3 million less than under the bill that was blocked last year . . . so it is obvious that some programs are going to be hurt and cut.”

Discipline Cases

Irked by the Bar’s burgeoning backlog of attorney discipline cases, the Legislature adjourned last fall without passing the annual dues bill, leaving the Bar fearful that it would have to lay off employees or even close down.

Some legislators had threatened to hold up collection of dues this year until the Bar was officially stripped of its disciplinary function.

State Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside) earlier this month introduced a bill to place attorney discipline under a separate state agency.

But even the Bar’s most vociferous critics, including Assembly Minority Leader Pat Nolan (R-Glendale) who blocked the dues bill last fall, voted to authorize 1986 dues while debating the discipline question.

“We felt the responsible thing to do was to have this limited time extension of the Bar’s existence to allow us to come up with real reform,” Nolan told the Assembly on Monday in urging passage of the bill.

An aide to Nolan said the assemblyman had insisted on--and won--elimination of the $35 dues increase that the Bar had anticipated.

While legislators are considering further controls over the Bar, the current bill requires:

--Submission of the 1987 Bar budget for approval by legislators.

--A plebiscite of all California attorneys conducted by the state auditor general on the proper functions of the Bar, including whether membership should be voluntary or mandatory as it is now, whether the Bar should discipline attorneys and whether the Bar should lobby the Legislature.

--Spending an additional $20 of the dues of each member on attorney discipline.

“This is the most control we have ever had over attorneys in the history of the Bar Assn.,” Nolan told his fellow legislators.

The assemblyman said later that he was extremely pleased with the compromise and eager to proceed with detailed hearings on Presley’s bill, which he is co-sponsoring.

To keep the Bar afloat while the Legislature pondered mandatory dues collection, Heilbron initiated a novel plan to have lawyers pay dues voluntarily, a plan that he said worked “wonderfully.”

To date, the Bar has collected $9.5 million from 45,000 lawyers, or half of its members, and is roughly $3 million ahead of collections for years in which dues were mandatory.

Volunteers Overpay

Because lawyers were asked to pay the expected $35 increase (for total dues of $215, $150 or $135), the volunteers have now overpaid. Heilbron said they will be given a choice of a refund or a credit toward 1987 dues.

As for future combat in Sacramento, Heilbron said, “I expect there will be a lot of hearings up there this year.”

He said he is particularly concerned about the control that legislators have assumed over the Bar’s budget.

“Clearly it provides a new mechanism through which somebody who is inclined to do it can try to inhibit one program or another,” he said, “and the implications of that obviously are of concern.”

Heilbron said he considered the plebiscite redundant because the Bar recently conducted a survey of members in which 90% of the 9,000 lawyers who responded favored retaining current Bar programs, including admissions and discipline.

But he particularly criticized a provision precluding any lobbying of members about the plebiscite.

“The damned bill provides that the Bar cannot use Bar funds to communicate with Bar members about any issue in that plebiscite. You cannot provide information from your perspective as to what it is the Bar does, and why, in light of that, the person ought to vote one way or another. I think prohibiting information is bad.”