Benchmark Set by Law Schools --How Can This Be Good?

Make a list in your head of the things California needs 122,000 of.

I got as far as “trees” and “doughnut shops” and drew a blank.

Fact: The state of California has 122,000 licensed attorneys. I made sure the person at the state bar association repeated that figure, just to make sure I got it right. At least she didn’t say “only” when she recited the number.

The total seems awfully high and yet is but half the number that has appeared on the “Geraldo” show since the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke. You get the feeling watching Geraldo nightly that you’re watching the barristers’ equivalent of Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour in which performers audition in the hopes of landing a permanent TV gig.

This has been a banner year in Orange County for lawyers. Make that, potential lawyers. Both Chapman University and Western State law schools have received American Bar Assn. accreditation, meaning their graduates now will get all the best tables in restaurants. Those schools join Whittier Law School, which relocated last year from Los Angeles to Costa Mesa, to form the Holy Trinity as the county’s three ABA-accredited schools.

If you’re keeping track, that means that in a single year, the county has gone from no ABA-accredited schools to three. Is this the direction we really want to go?

The cheap joke would be to say that if we’re going to continue accrediting law schools, that’ll only encourage them to produce more lawyers.

But as the careful reader knows, this is not the cheap-joke section of the newspaper. This is the enlightened commentary section, and with that in mind, consider the remarks of A. Brooks Gresham, Loyola Marymount Class of ’91 and a member of the Orange County Bar Assn.’s Resolutions Committee. In other words, a lawyer who thinks seriously about his profession.

I asked nicely if there are just too many damned lawyers.

“Recruits [for law firms] are difficult to come by these days,” he says. “Law students from good schools get employed pretty quickly, salaries continue to rise, they’re in great demand. So, if you were to ask hiring partners, they’d say, no, there are not enough lawyers and we need more to meet the demand from clients.

“But if you were to ask the average lawyer, ‘Are you glad to see more lawyers on the scene?’ they would say they are not happy because, A, it cuts into business and, B, not even lawyers want a more litigious society.”

Gresham, 34, and the son of a lawyer with a 45-year career, says suits are filed today that wouldn’t have been 30 years ago. People of his father’s generation, he says, lament that lawyering today “is no longer a profession and is a business. That increases the incidence of frivolous lawsuits.”

Gresham may or may not have had these lawsuits in mind, provided by our research department:

* The student who sued a university after falling from his fourth-floor dorm window while “mooning” passers-by.

* The golfer who won damages after hitting a ball that ricocheted off railroad tracks running through the course and then struck her in the nose.

* The New York prison guard who claimed she was driven into having an affair with an inmate because of harassment from her fellow guards.

The good news, says Gresham, who lives in Laguna Niguel and practices in Los Angeles, is that today’s law schools probably have tougher standards. The bad news is that no one expects a quick reversal of the trend toward more frivolous suits.

Warily, then, I ask Gresham if there’s any downside to Orange County having three ABA-accredited schools.

No, he says.

But do we really need three, I ask.

“That really begs the question: Do we need more lawyers in California?” he responds. “Lawyers are educated people, we’ve been to several years of school and we try to lead the examined life. I don’t think lawyers are happy about the way society is going. There are many lawyers who would gladly trade in their cap and gown and do something else if society were to become less litigious.”

The Orange County Bar Assn. claims 6,000 members but nonmembers push the county’s total to 10,000, according to previously published reports. Even so, perhaps there’s no reason to fret the sudden glut of accredited law schools.

Still, this cautionary tale. . . .

When it appeared in 1997 that Chapman might not get accreditation, several students felt the school had misled them about its chances. The students weighed their options and made a decision:

They filed a lawsuit against the school.

*

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821, by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail at dana.parsons@latimes.com.