State Bar Elects Business Lawyer as President

Costa Mesa attorney Andrew Guilford has been elected president of the State Bar, which is recovering from a political dispute that left it on the brink of bankruptcy.

Guilford, 48, a business lawyer and partner in the firm of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton, was chosen over James Seff, another big-firm partner, by fellow members of the bar’s Board of Governors at a weekend meeting. He will begin a one-year term at the bar’s convention Oct. 2.

The mandatory-membership organization for California’s 160,000 lawyers nearly shut down last year after then-Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed the bill that required lawyers to pay bar dues. He said the bar was too big, too political and too involved in activities unrelated to licensing and regulating lawyers.

Deprived of its chief source of income, the bar laid off most of its staff and stopped investigating new public complaints about lawyers. But the state Supreme Court declared a crisis in lawyer discipline last December and ordered the 130,000 practicing lawyers to pay $173 each to return the disciplinary system to partial operation.

Gov. Gray Davis supports reviving the bar, but Republican opposition has blocked the two-thirds legislative majority needed to restore full dues authority immediately. A bill nearing final passage would set dues at $395 a year, $63 below the previous level, and reinstate educational and legal service programs and the full disciplinary system, effective next year.

Guilford, a past president of the Orange County Bar Assn. and an advocate of increased legal aid for the poor, said the restoration of funding would offer an opportunity to reform the bar.