Standing Legal Ground Against the Bar

When Paul Ortiz was fired, he figured it was because he is HIV-positive. And when he decided to sue his bosses for discrimination, it stood to reason he had the inside track in finding a lawyer.

After all, for eight months he had been offering attorney referrals to people with legal problems.

But it took Ortiz almost two years to find a lawyer in Nevada to represent him.

The problem: Ortiz’s employer was none other than the Nevada State Bar Assn., which represents the state’s 6,000 lawyers, and whose motto is “Making the law work for everyone.”

His complaint of discrimination was heard swiftly by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which promptly ordered both sides into mediation. When a resolution was not reached, the commission staff conducted its own investigation into Ortiz’s complaints and, two months ago, found that his charge of discrimination had merit.

“The preponderance of the evidence supports [Ortiz’s] claim that he was discharged because of his disability,” wrote Tulio L. Diaz, acting director for the commission district office in Los Angeles.

Diaz told the bar association to settle the case or face a federal lawsuit brought either by Ortiz or the commission. Those settlement talks are still pending.

The State Bar of Nevada is keeping tight-lipped about the Ortiz case, but says it takes the complaint “very seriously.”

“We look forward to meeting with Mr. Ortiz and EEOC to review the allegations and the facts of the case,” said Patty Blakeman, the bar’s spokeswoman.

For all his success so far, Ortiz managed to find a lawyer in the state only last month, with help from the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada. He is Richard Segerblom, a Las Vegas specialist in employment law, who has been honored by the ACLU for his work.

“Going after the state bar is something you think twice about, given their control over your future,” Segerblom said.

Indeed, the state bar exercises great control over Nevada’s lawyers. It administers the bar exam, hears complaints about attorneys, metes out discipline, conducts professional training programs and offers attorney referrals--for which it receives 20% of any fees paid to the referred lawyer.

The first lawyer Ortiz found who was sympathetic to his case was Oakland attorney Vicki Laden, a specialist in disability rights and medical privacy. Ortiz saw her on a television news program discussing the Americans With Disabilities Act, and contacted her after his calls to Nevada lawyers proved fruitless.

Laden agreed to help Ortiz, but wanted a Nevada lawyer as co-counsel to attend hearings in Las Vegas. She discovered the same problem Ortiz encountered in finding lawyers willing to take on the Nevada State Bar.

“Attorneys wouldn’t regard the State Bar of California as a sacred cow, but that’s how it seems to be in Nevada,” she said. “Everyone seemed intimidated.”

Over and over again, she said, she’d lay out the facts of the case to lawyers, but when she mentioned the target of the case, the response invariably was, “ ‘Oh, I’m not really interested in being involved in a case against the state bar,’ ” she said.

“It was depressing,” Laden said. “If the California bar had operated this way, people would be surrounding the building, pelting it with stones.”

Finally, at the urging of Gary Peck, executive director of the ACLU of Nevada, Segerblom agreed to take the case. By then, the commission had already sided with Ortiz, and Segerblom acknowledged that the case was more attractive.

Ortiz, who previously worked as a paralegal for two Los Angeles law firms, was hired by the Nevada bar in January 1998 to work at its lawyer-referral desk. He was fired eight months later--two months after he disclosed to his supervisors that he had contracted HIV, and at a time, he said, when the bar was reevaluating its group medical coverage plans in an effort to reduce costs.

Despite previous positive job performance reviews, he said, the mood in the office shifted abruptly when he disclosed his condition. He was near panic when he was fired, he said, because of the pending loss of medical insurance coverage to pay for his various and expensive prescriptions and specialists.

After a stint on public assistance, Ortiz got a full-time office job with a grocery chain that provides benefits.

While bar officials won’t discuss the case, they contended in papers filed with the commission that Ortiz was a slacker and that a disproportionately large number of callers had complained that he was rude.

“Although Mr. Ortiz’s alleged medical condition is unfortunate, the existence of HIV/AIDS does not require an employer to tolerate poor job performance,” the bar wrote to the commission.

Ortiz denies those charges, and his lawyers have countered with positive testimonials from some of his co-workers, including one who shared a cubicle, and a log of calls that showed Ortiz worked as dutifully as others.

In the wake of local publicity about the Ortiz case, the ACLU’s Peck said he has heard complaints from other bar employees that “there is a discomforting climate toward people who are not white, male and heterosexual.”

Peck said he hasn’t investigated the claims, and the bar’s Blakeman dismissed them. “I’m not aware of any atmosphere like that,” she said.