State’s No. 1 Legal Eagle Is Poised for Flight : Law: San Diego lawyer John Seitman takes over the reins of the State Bar of California. He faces a year of mundane but important issues.

John Seitman is arguably the most important lawyer in California. He also is a nice guy. What’s wrong with this picture?

Loyal and low-key, Seitman has spent his entire 25-year career at one San Diego law firm. He is an avid San Diego Padres baseball fan and diligent Little League coach. He grew up in a small Illinois farm town and is given to country-fried aphorisms--for instance, that leading a group of lawyers through a difficult project can be “as hard as herding cats.”

This is the same man whom colleagues describe as a master of the down-and-dirty arts of negotiating and politicking, at the back-room business of one-on-one problem-solving. Seitman always gets it done, lawyers and judges and friends said, in a spirit of small-town good cheer and resolute earnestness.

For a year, Seitman, 49, will have his hands full when it comes to maintaining good cheer. He was sworn in Sunday for a yearlong run as president of the 128,000-lawyer State Bar of California, meaning he will be its presiding officer and chief spokesman.

Seitman will be the second State Bar president from San Diego in three years. Colin Wied served as president in 1989. Seitman succeeds Charles S. Vogel, a Los Angeles lawyer and former Superior Court judge, taking over at a ceremony in Anaheim.

“I don’t necessarily want to put it this way, but he’s sort of like a fella who comes on the football field wearing black socks. You know, everyone’s supposed to wear white and you wonder how good is he,” Vogel said. “But after you play with him a while, you know he’s good, damn good, period.”

Unlike previous years, the bar’s agenda for the year does not appear to be jammed with headline-grabbing issues. An extensive lawyer discipline program has been in place now for a couple years, earning positive marks from its monitors. The bar has opted not to allow paralegals to provide legal services. A rule that would bar lawyer-client sex is in limbo.

Instead of glitz, Seitman should be free to focus on more mundane concerns.

Take rules for new programs mandating lawyers’ continuing education. Or whether to raise each lawyer’s already-steep $478 annual dues. Or consider something called “court consolidation.”

By March, the county courts must come up with plans for combining the workload at municipal and superior courts. There are barriers of tradition in the way, Seitman said. But it should mean “greater flexibility and greater efficiency,” meaning the public should get its cases to trial faster, and that’s good, he said.

These are the kinds of issues better suited to negotiating than speechifying. And they are at the top of Seitman’s wish list.

“I’d like to see us focus attention on the lawyer as problem solver,” Seitman said. “Because that’s what we do. That’s what we have always done.”

What lawyers do has, in recent years, however, spawned a slew of lawyer jokes and inspired rounds of lawyer bashing, almost all of it to the effect that lawyers are money-grubbers who are not nice people.

Unlike other bar leaders who have made the interests of lawyers a priority, Seitman also made it clear that his central emphasis will be on service to the public--making sure that, despite the popular perception to the contrary, the vast majority of lawyers are ethical and competent.

“To the extent someone wants to make a will or be defended in lawsuit or whatever, that person has an enormous interest in competence,” Seitman said. “We’re involved heavily in the competence business.”

That philosophy of public service fits in with his one unusual proposition. Seitman said he’d like to see fewer lawsuits, though that would mean less work for lawyers. Lawsuits last too long and cost too much, so lawyers, as public servants, ought to focus on ways to iron out disputes without a dash to the courthouse door, he said.

Having identified the problem, however, Seitman said he remains--for now--without a solution.

“It seems to me that what we need to do is to focus--lawyers and judges and the public--we all need to ask ourselves right at the outset of the problem, ‘What is the most appropriate way to deal with the problem and get it resolved quickly?’ Because once you get in the full litigation track, the time you devote to it and the expense are very substantial.

“And everyone’s stomach is going to be in an uproar until it gets resolved,” Seitman said.

Seitman’s colleagues said they suspect that if anyone can keep tummies soothed at the bar, he can. The agency is run by its 23-member board of governors, made up mostly of lawyers but with some members of the public, and the president is chosen for an annual term from board members.

“John just runs a very efficient operation,” said San Diego attorney Ned Huntington. “Not because he’s eloquent, which he is to some degree, nor because he’s dynamic as a leader. It’s probably because he is very effective. Effective is the most useful word of any I can think of to describe him.”

“John is a very solid and considerate person,” said Vogel, the 1991 bar president. “He is very effective in one-on-one interpersonal relationships. As people are exposed to him, they tend to gain confidence in him. That’s partly due to his willingness to listen and to consider other points of view before acting.”

Catherine Sprinkles, the San Jose attorney who was runner-up to Seitman in the election this past July for bar president, said he is “not probably going to institute some incredible new program. But he will bring people together and move the institution forward.”

She added: “I can’t give you anything spicy about John. There may be something somewhere, but I don’t know about it. He just engenders confidence, and that’s good. He just gives you that feeling of good ol’ Midwestern solidness and comfort.”

Seitman was born and reared in Fairbury, Ill., a town of 3,000 people about 50 miles north of Champaign. He went to the University of Illinois, in Champaign, for both college and law school, inspired by repeated visits to a family friend who was an attorney.

“In this little stone corner building on the corner lot, there was this law office, with a high-backed red leather chair and papers everywhere,” Seitman said. “I was fascinated by the lawyer and what he did.

“My father, a physician, a surgeon, was by his nature and his profession somebody who was involved in helping people,” Seitman said. “But it was the lawyer he turned to when he needed help.”

Seitman came to San Diego after visiting a school pal, Doug Royer, who had already moved west. Royer is now a partner at Seltzer, Caplan, Wilkins and McMahon, one of San Diego’s leading firms.

“Back in the years where you could literally get 10 hamburgers for a dollar at McDonald’s, John started out there as a fry cook in Champaign, with his white hat, and worked his way up to manager of the store, in about two years,” Royer said.

“John is one of these guys that people like,” Royer said. “He works hard. He’s always worked hard, even when we were at school. When he found something to be particularly challenging, he worked extra hard at it to be the best he could do at it.”

Seitman arrived at work in San Diego on Oct. 10, 1966, and has been at the same firm, now called Lindley, Lazar & Scales, ever since, specializing in business law. “I’m a dinosaur,” he said.

The dinosaur not just survived at private practice but found he thrived on bar activities. In 1986, Seitman served as president of the San Diego County Bar Assn.

“His tenure was uniformly covered by blandness,” said Huntington, who was the county bar’s 1988 president. “The reason for that is that John is just an exquisitely competent back-room politician. I mean that as nothing other than compliment.

“He is a master at making sure that people don’t get their feathers brushed the wrong way, that people are in agreement before (an issue) comes to an official vote or ballot,” Huntington said. “The meetings were totally unrancorous.”

San Diego lawyer William McCurine Jr. called Seitman “just a good ol’ guy. He’s not pedantic. Nor overbearing. Nor arrogant. He’s the kind of guy you’d like to go fishing with or to dinner with.

“He just does not fit the pattern of a bar president who tries to be somewhat regal or imperial, quite ready to sound off on a variety of social issues,” McCurine said. “John is more your workman,” adding that Seitman “has been able to maintain a sense of balance and humility that people don’t often associate with lawyers.”

Hold those nice thoughts for a year, Seitman said. “I’ve got a lot of plans,” he said.

And the year after? “My plan for 1993 is to manage my son’s Little League team,” he said.