State Bar Tables Plan to Restrict Attorney-Client Sex : Law: Leaders will begin talks with lawmaker who has been lobbying for an outright ban on such relationships. Other proposals will be studied.

Faced again with opposition from a key lawmaker, State Bar leaders on Friday set aside a compromise proposal for a landmark ethical rule restricting sexual conduct between lawyers and their clients.

Instead, a Bar Board of Governors committee voted to begin direct negotiations to fashion an agreement with state Assemblywoman Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles), who is seeking an outright ban on such relationships.

The committee also decided to study novel proposals that would require attorneys who have sex with clients to warn them in writing of the potential “adverse effects,” assure clients obtain the advice of another lawyer on the matter and then obtain the clients’ written consent to continued representation.

The action came after the frustrated committee failed to end a three-month deadlock over an attempt to approve an ethical rule that would make California’s legal profession the first in the nation to attempt to regulate lawyer-client sex. Any rule ultimately adopted by the board would require final approval by the state Supreme Court before becoming binding on the state’s 128,000 licensed lawyers. A violation could result in disbarment or suspension from practicing law.

The State Bar was directed to come up with a rule under 1989 legislation sponsored by Roybal-Allard. The lawmaker is waging a campaign aimed at preventing lawyers from taking advantage of emotionally vulnerable clients-- particularly those going through bitter divorces or child custody disputes.

Attempts by the Bar leaders since December to pass a rule that would satisfy Roybal-Allard and privacy concerns within the profession have ended in failure. On Friday, the committee unveiled yet another proposal, which, while stopping short of an outright ban, would prohibit attorneys from demanding sex with a client or using “undue influence” to obtain sex.

But Henry J. Contreras, chief consultant to Roybal-Allard, told committee members the lawmaker did not consider the proposal “responsive” to her concerns. Contreras said that the assemblywoman would proceed with proposed legislation that would prohibit lawyer-client sex by statute, except in the rare instances when the client is the spouse of the attorney or the sexual relationship predates the lawyer-client legal relationship.

Confronted by that opposition, the committee set aside its proposal and began direct discussions with Roybal-Allard and her staff in an effort to achieve a compromise. Contreras told reporters afterward that he considered the action “a move in the right direction.”

Some committee members said such negotiations should have begun long before. “I fear you have scorned a legislator and I fear you have scorned a woman,” Richard A. Annotico of Los Angeles, a non-lawyer member of the board, told the committee. “To me that adds up to double trouble.”

“Unless it’s Saddam Hussein, we ought to be able to make some progress,” said Victor I. McCarty, another public member from Long Beach.