Lucas Takes Post With National Arbitration Firm

Malcolm M. Lucas, who retired in May as chief justice of the California Supreme Court, said Monday he will join JAMS/Endispute, a privately held national arbitration company.

Lucas, 69, is the highest-ranking judge to join the Irvine company, which now relies on about 300 retired judges in 31 U.S. cities. He will be based in Los Angeles and will begin next month to arbitrate mainly complex civil matters, typically disputes between companies.

As a lawyer in a firm with former Gov. George Deukmejian, Lucas specialized in civil litigation. He became a Superior Court judge in 1967 and a U.S. District Court judge in 1971. Deukmejian appointed him to the high court in 1984 and elevated him to chief justice three years later.

“The hope is that I’ll handle complex civil matters, but I’m not closing the door on anything at all,” Lucas said Monday. “I come from a background in the federal court where every judge is expected to be a generalist, not a specialist.”

Lucas presided over the state Supreme Court as it turned dramatically more conservative and increasingly pro-business in its rulings, an apparent mandate after voters ousted the liberal Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird in 1986. He has been credited with restoring order and collegiality to the court after the tumultuous Bird years.

Lucas’s decision to join JAMS gives a major boost to alternative dispute resolution (ADR), the name now given to arbitration and mediation services. It also will likely stir debate again over the trend toward using private arbitrators to resolve disputes.

These services not only relieve some of the burden on underfunded public courts, they also provide arbitrators for the growing number of consumer contracts--in fields like banking, health care and real estate--that require arbitration to resolve disputes.

But critics contend that it is an elitist service that caters to wealthy corporations, operates with little accountability and is too expensive for consumers and too secretive for a democratic society.

“I appreciate the criticisms,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to say they’re not real to those people, but that is the last of my concerns [because] we have a traditional court system that is backlogged and too expensive for litigants. ADR supports and is parallel to traditional courts and doesn’t compete with them.”

He pointed out that arbitration is not the best alternative for every industry or every situation. He also said practitioners must be careful to make the arbitration process “an even playing field” for all sides.

Begun in 1979 as Judicial Arbitration & Mediation Services Inc., JAMS merged with Endispute in Washington to become the biggest private company in the nation in this field.