Brown Accused of Attempting to Ease Lawyer-Discipline Rules

Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, once the target of a State Bar of California investigation, is being accused by legal and consumer interests of trying to erode reforms that markedly toughened the lawyer disciplinary system.

The San Francisco Democrat has proposed last-minute changes to a bill increasing lawyers’ dues to the State Bar. Consumer interests say the Brown changes would make major revisions in the disciplinary process and do “serious harm” to the 2-year-old reforms.

Brown, who hopes the Senate Judiciary Committee will endorse the changes today, reacted angrily to the complaints, saying reformers lacked “(nerve) enough to come confront me” and are “full of (it)” for suggesting he is trying to undermine the disciplinary system.

The Speaker said he is only attempting to fine-tune the reforms after getting complaints from fellow lawyers that they were unworkable, undemocratic and unfair to attorneys. He declined to name the lawyers.

“These (changes) are needed to make the reforms work,” Brown said.

A group of lawyers and consumer advocates who worked on a series of bills by Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside) to strengthen the lawyer disciplinary system said they have heard few complaints about the reforms and questioned the decision to introduce major changes during the last three weeks of the 1989-90 legislative session.

“If you read these provisions they sound like provisions that would be dreamed up by somebody who was once investigated by the Bar and is very (ticked) off about it,” said Phillip Martin, a former Bar prosecutor now specializing in representing lawyers in disciplinary cases.

Brown ran afoul of the Bar disciplinary system last year when Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury complained that the Speaker had improperly contacted a judge who was hearing traffic charges against the daughter of Assemblywoman Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley). After a 4 1/2-month investigation, the Bar decided to take no action, saying that “there was no evidence . . . of a violation” of Bar rules.

Brown’s press secretary, Michael Reese, acknowledged that Brown’s decision to seek changes in the disciplinary process was influenced in part by his own experience.

“Because the (Bar) rules were the way they were (he felt) it was entirely too easy for people to bring what he thought were groundless charges against him,” Reese said. “What he is proposing are ways he thinks make it more difficult to bring groundless charges against an attorney while in no way impeding the ability of clients to file legitimate complaints.”

Under Brown’s proposals, complaints against attorneys would be filed under penalty of perjury, a change that Brown said would protect lawyers from people making false charges. Reform advocates, who include Jim Wheaton, former staff attorney for the University of San Diego’s Center for Public Interest Law, said the change would “intimidate” and discourage consumers from filing complaints. They noted that in disciplinary systems governing other professions there is no such requirement.

Brown’s proposals also would force the Bar to keep disciplinary investigations and records confidential unless formal charges are filed. Bar rules now permit it to reveal that an investigation is in progress in certain cases. After Bradbury made public his accusations against Brown, the Bar confirmed it was investigating the case.

Summing up his reaction to Brown’s proposals in a strongly worded letter to the Speaker, Robert Fellmuth, the State Bar discipline monitor, said they were “so damaging to the process of constructive reform now under way” that it would be better to forgo the dues increases than approve Brown’s bill as he is proposing it.

The Bar had requested that the annual dues paid by most lawyers be increased from $440 to $498 to pay for new judges to handle disciplinary cases and beef up a fund that reimburses consumers who have been defrauded by lawyers. The dues of the Bar, an arm of the Supreme Court, must be set by the Legislature.

Reese said the Speaker is willing to consider compromising on several points, including additional proposals that would require all Bar judges to be former judges and would prevent the Bar from having access to disciplinary actions that may have been taken against a person while in law school. But he said the Speaker did not want to budge on the perjury issue.

State Bar President Alan Rothenberg, disagreeing with reform advocates, said his organization could live with such a compromise even if the perjury proposal remained intact.

“These are things the Bar could comply with and do not adversely affect efforts to clean up the disciplinary process,” he said.

A special assistant to Presley, however, said the senator had “problems” with all the proposals and would try to resolve them with the Speaker.