Advisory Vote on Abolition of State Bar Begins

Sparked by anger over compulsory dues to practice law, a plebiscite on whether to abolish the State Bar of California begins today when ballots are mailed out to 120,000 lawyers.

The effort to dismantle the 70-year-old organization stems from legislation by state Sen. Quentin L. Kopp (I-San Francisco), who obtained passage of a bill requiring the nonbinding advisory vote and a state audit of bar finances. The state bar has a budget of $68 million a year.

“The State Bar of California is the longest-running scam in California history,” said Peter Keane, San Francisco’s chief assistant public defender, who is working with Kopp to transfer bar duties elsewhere and replace the organization with a voluntary association.

The state audit, released this week, found that the bar has failed to take opportunities to reduce its compulsory $478 annual membership fee, which supports offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles, 700 employees and programs to discipline wayward lawyers and help lawyers fill continuing education requirements.

The audit is “a smoking gun of their bureaucratic ineptness, inefficiency and financial waste,” said Keane, who also hosts a Bay Area radio program about the law.

State bar dues in California are among the highest in the nation. While lawyers must spend $478 a year to practice in California, doctors and dentists pay significantly less in mandatory fees--doctors $578 every two years and dentists $240 biennially.

Bar President James Towery, a San Jose litigator, said he believes that lawyers will vote by a solid majority, although not a landslide, to retain the bar because of fears of what might replace it. The advisory ballot question does not provide an alternative to the bar.

The lawyers’ votes will be tabulated in July and reported to the Legislature, where Kopp has drafted a bill that would transfer bar duties to the Administrative Office of the Courts under the California Supreme Court.

“I am cautiously optimistic that we will get a no vote,” Towery said, even though he compares the plebiscite to “a referendum on the popularity of the Internal Revenue Service.”

The state bar was established in 1927 to ensure that lawyers maintain high ethical standards, he said. “Keeping the bar is the best way to keep those high ethical standards,” Towery said, “and that is certainly what I am hearing from other lawyers.”

Bar supporters have hired a political consultant to try to persuade lawyers to vote against abolition. Towery refused to disclose how much will be spent on that effort but said it will be “significantly less” than $200,000, the amount bar critics claim has been targeted for the campaign. Leaders of the abolition effort have raised a few thousand dollars.

Although the state audit said the bar could recover its costs more effectively and reduce spending, Towery insisted that the report was positive because it did not recommend a major shake-up. He said the bar will implement most of the auditor’s recommendations.

“No fair reading of this report can support abolishing the bar,” Towery said at a news conference at bar headquarters in San Francisco this week.

If the bar wins the referendum, Towery has pledged that the organization will reduce dues $20 next year. Vote to abolish the bar, Kopp countered, and lawyers can save about $100 a year.

But the size of the bar fee is not the only grievance lawyers have against the organization. Some philosophically oppose compulsory membership, others believe that the bar is either too strict or too lax in disciplining lawyers, and still others complain that the organization is timid and fails to take leadership positions on important legal topics.

Conservatives contend that the bar is dominated by liberals. Liberals contend that it is too cozy with conservative lawmakers, who must approve legislation establishing bar dues every year.

UC Berkeley law professor Stephen Barnett likened the bar’s continuing education courses to “mandatory political correctness,” which he resents being forced to support in order to practice law in the state.

“The bar is a bloated bureaucracy whose main raison d’etre is to maintain and expand its empire,” the law professor said.

Keane, who ran for the bar Board of Governors as a reformer and served as a governor from 1992 to 1995, said most bar governors try to use the voluntary post as a steppingstone to becoming a judge or for networking.

These lawyers take expensive annual junkets to fancy resorts and hold “tedious sessions of hot air” that resolve nothing “while the bureaucrats get away with the store,” he said.

Towery is irritated by such jabs. He described the annual retreats as business affairs at which bar governors work on strategic planning.

Both sides concede that many lawyers may be unaware of the referendum until they find the ballot in their mail during the next several days. Kopp and Keane fear that many may not bother to vote. Those most likely to want to abolish the bar are sole practitioners or law professors who do not work for big firms that pay the dues.

Times researcher Norma Kaufman contributed to this report.