No Bar, No Defense

The State Bar of California, broke and shuttered, can no longer defend the public against the bad lawyers in its midst. Complaints about lawyers, a major part of the bar’s responsibility, now number more than 5,000 and are piling up in the bar’s mail room, unattended since investigators were laid off.

Judges who suspect attorneys of misconduct have no more recourse than the general public. Last month a federal trial judge, angered by an attorney’s alleged manufacturing of evidence, threatened to report him to the state bar, then paused and mentioned “appropriate federal discipline.”

The activities of the more than 1,000 lawyers placed on probation by the state bar are now unsupervised. No random drug or alcohol tests are performed, no audits conducted on client accounts.

There’s plenty of blame to go around in this mess, but Gov. Wilson deserves the most. First of all, he precipitated the crisis by vetoing the bar’s funding bill last October, and then he stonewalled those who tried hard in recent months to draft a compromise.

Wilson said his beef was that the lawyer dues that fund the state bar were too high at $458 per year. The bar gets no tax revenue, and as a constitutional agency its dues must be approved by the governor. Wilson and others also object to what they see as the bar’s partisan lobbying and lax fiscal management.

By vetoing the dues bill, the governor left the bar penniless and set lawmakers scrambling to draft legislation to lower dues and limit the scope of state bar activities. With few options and dwindling cash, bar leaders agreed to those changes and laid off hundreds of employees. The crisis deepened when Wilson then sought more concessions, including power over the bar’s governance.

The state bar’s widely praised system of discipline, which all sides in this debate agree is a necessary check on unscrupulous or incompetent attorneys, has now become a pawn in a game of political chicken. With the system now in mothballs, the public--anyone who needs a lawyer--is the big loser.

There’s still a chance for a compromise before the Legislature adjourns. The governor should ponder his legacy in this arena. Does he want to destroy a 71-year-old institution that performs a vital public service? That’s exactly what’s going to happen if Wilson does not act sensibly and soon.