Trial by Elders Appeals to Lawyers : Inns of Court Helps New Attorneys Hone Courtroom Skills

Bruce Fagan had all the credentials to be a lawyer when he came to San Diego in 1983. He held a law degree from the University of Maryland. He had passed the California bar exam. He had a job at a respected law firm, Seltzer Caplan Wilkins & McMahon.

The only trouble was that he didn’t know what to do when he got to court.

“When you’re in your first year, you don’t know anything,” Fagan recalled. “They don’t teach you anything in law school about trials.”

So Fagan, like a growing number of young lawyers in San Diego and 27 other cities, turned to his elders for help.

Turns to Organization

He sought and won admission to the local chapter of the American Inns of Court--a 7-year-old program inspired by British tradition and intended to transmit to a new generation of lawyers the advocacy skills and sense of ethics that attorneys consider their profession’s finest qualities.

Each inn brings together 20 or 30 of its city’s most highly regarded judges and trial lawyers, a handful of promising lawyers with several years of experience, and several dozen law students or newly minted law school graduates. They meet monthly for demonstrations of lawyering technique, discussions of the toughest issues in legal ethics and open, candid critiques of the members’ performances.

For young lawyers, membership in an inn is like working beside an avuncular senior partner with the courtroom abilities of a top trial lawyer, the gravity and wisdom of a judge and the ethical precision and insight of the best law professors.

“It’s an opportunity to learn about trials, to learn how to be a trial attorney, to learn from the best trial attorneys and best judges in town how to do that,” said Jeffrey Greer, a 1983 graduate of Western State University who works for McCormick & Royce, a San Diego law firm specializing in defense in civil cases. “You can pick up things that will kind of short-cut the period when you fall on your face.”

This Year’s Meeting

The fledgling inn movement held its annual meeting Friday and Saturday at the Hotel del Coronado. From a start in 1980 with just one inn in Provo, Utah, there now are 31--including three in Utah and three in Los Angeles.

The concept has a distinguished--and influential--parentage.

It was then-Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren E. Burger who viewed the British inn system as a tonic for the flaccid state of litigation in the United States in the late 1970s. In Britain, most lawyers are called “solicitors” and never appear in court. Only “barristers” do. To be a barrister, one must belong to an inn--a social and professional fraternity that controls the quality of the trial bar, imposes discipline for misconduct and provides a setting for informal, continuing professional education for its members.

Given the American tradition of bar associations and open access to court for all lawyers, Burger concluded that it was the collegial, educational aspects of the inn system that could most easily be imported to the United States.

Shepherded First Inn

And import he did. The chief justice saw to the establishment of the first U.S. inn at Brigham Young University, formed a committee of the U.S. Judicial Conference to husband the program and now, in his retirement, serves on the board of the American Inns of Court Foundation, the flagship of the national movement.

With strong urgings from Burger, federal judges throughout the country took the lead in establishing inns in their cities. U.S. District Judge William Enright has been the driving force behind San Diego’s chapter, which was established in 1984 and he is its president.

“Everybody gripes about the professional standards and the advocacy skills, and here, by God, is something you can do about it,” Enright said. “I think this is the most important thing I can be involved in.”

Enright, U.S. District Judge Howard Turrentine and three former presidents of the San Diego County Bar Assn. culled a list of 25 lawyers and judges from the 7,000-member local bar and invited them to serve as the founding “masters” of the inn--the teaching faculty and role models for the younger members.

Currently, the roster of masters includes three U.S. District Court judges, two Superior Court judges and a justice of the state 4th District Court of Appeal. The trial lawyers include criminal defense attorneys Milton J. Silverman and Richard Muir; civil lawyers Gerald McMahon, Craig Higgs and Daniel T. Broderick III; divorce lawyer Bonnie Reading and other leaders of the local bar.

The inn is named in honor of retired San Diego County Superior Court Judge Louis Welsh, who years ago instituted a continuing series of practical seminars for young trial lawyers at the county courthouse. Graduates of Welsh’s program make up the bulk of the pool of recruits for the San Diego inn.

Learning by Listening

One evening each month, a team composed of masters, new lawyers and lawyers of moderate experience puts on a program for the entire inn on subjects ranging from jury selection to ethics to what judges like and dislike about trial lawyers.

“We don’t focus on where to sit in the courtroom or where the water fountain is in the hall,” said civil litigator William G. Bailey, a founder of the San Diego inn. “We deal with more sophisticated things.”

Both younger and older members of the inns say they value the chance to schmooze with judges and high-powered colleagues.

“When we were students or young lawyers at the bar, what we would have given to rub elbows or break bread or anything with the leading members of the bar or a judge!” said Chief Judge Howard T. Markey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, who serves as chairman of the American Inns of Court Foundation.

“There’s a social aspect--the ‘old lawyers’ club,’ if you will--that’s very hard to quantify, but a lot of people would say is important,” Reading said.

Sherman Cohn, a Georgetown University law professor who is president of the foundation, said inn membership also provides an intellectual stimulus hard to find outside the classroom.

“A person needs to keep growing,” Cohn said. “As you get out into the trenches of the real world and have to worry about making your overhead, you need to be part of a group that puts peer pressure on you to continue your personal search for excellence, and your personal devotion to ethics and civility.”