Lawyers Give to Clients Who Were Taken : Law: The State Bar’s fund to compensate victims of unethical attorneys is busier than ever. The profession maintains it to improve an undesirable image.

The president of the State Bar of California wants to set the record straight. Shakespeare was not insulting the legal profession with the line, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” The character who uttered those words in “Henry VI” was himself a criminal, see, so the Bard was really offering praise, Charles Vogel said. You could look it up.

Whatever, the leader of the California bar is somewhat defensive about the fact that shys. . . , er, attorneys don’t have the greatest image. Some people might describe 500 lawyers on the bottom of the ocean as “a good start,” as the joke goes, but not Vogel.

That is one reason he presided over a press conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday at which the legal profession actually gave money to clients who were victimized by crooked lawyers.

Lesley-Anne Melloy, a Los Angeles resident who suffered whiplash in an auto accident, was handed a check for $3,333 to compensate for money she was denied when her lawyer forged her signature on a settlement check and deposited it in his own account.

Mary Dean, an Altadena resident, picked up checks for $5,500 for herself and $2,738 for her 17-year-old daughter, Tara. They had been denied settlements from an auto accident. “Just a dishonest lawyer,” Dean said of her troubles.

Television cameras and newspaper photographers recorded the event for posterity. The poet John Keats (“I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters”) would have been impressed.

The checks are, in a sense, the profession’s way of saying “we’re sorry” for the unsavory among them. Annual bar association dues include $40 set aside for a so-called “Client Security Fund” to compensate for the lawyers’ dishonest brethren.

The obscure program covers instances of theft and embezzlement rather than malpractice. It started in 1972 with an annual $5 contribution per lawyer, and since then it has paid out more than $12 million to 2,288 clients. But it is busier now than ever. In 1989, it paid $2.3 million on 584 claims. So far this year, 443 checks totaling about $2 million have been distributed.

Not that the legal profession has become any sleazier, Vogel asserted.

“I don’t know that lawyers are any more dishonest than other people,” he said. “There’s a level of dishonesty that runs through the entire population.”

Rather, he suggested, there are more crooked lawyers these days simply because there are more lawyers, especially in California. The state that is home to about one-ninth of the nation’s residents has about one-sixth of its lawyers. It has more than 124,000 in all, of whom about 103,000 are in practice.

More significant, Vogel said, has been the State Bar’s effort to clean its own house. A series of reforms triggered by an award-winning San Francisco Chronicle expose in 1985 transformed the Client Security Fund from a low priority to a high priority, he said.

William O. Fleischman, a Los Angeles real estate attorney who serves on the commission that oversees the fund, emphasized that the program often has to reject “borderline” claims. The program distinguishes between attorneys who commit malpractice and those who simply take the money and run.

“The guy who ran off with the client’s money--well, he’s a crook, and we’re going to take care of that,” Fleischman said.

The attorneys in these cases are disbarred through disciplinary action or by resignation. If they wish to regain their license to practice, they must reimburse the fund, Fleischman said.

Alcohol and drug abuse is a common problem among attorneys who defraud clients, Fleischman said. Melloy suggested that sympathy for her lawyer’s drug abuse was one reason she did not press criminal charges against him.

Vogel said clients who believe they have lost money to dishonest lawyers could call 800-843-9053 to learn more about the fund.

Although the program does not offer much relief to victims of malpractice, individuals are advised of their legal options, Fleischman said.

“We tell them, ‘Look, sue this guy,’ ” he said.