The guiding hand goes

As one who was there from prior to the creation of the State Bar Court in 1989 through its “adolescent” years, I can only say what a great loss it is to see Judge Ron Stovitz retiring. Without his vision, the former volunteer-based discipline process — which worked fine for the minor cases but was horribly deficient in addressing the worst offenders — would never have been transformed into one of the success stories of our profession.

Prior to 1989, he was the “go to guy” for many of us volunteer referees and principal referees, but despite this it became clear that there was little in the way of consistency in what the referees were determining as to appropriate discipline in similar cases.

“Judge Ron” (as we later pro tem judges called him) was the guiding hand behind the creation of the State Bar Court in 1989. He was always ready to offer advice when appropriate, and even when he reversed a few (minor) aspects of our disciplinary decisions, he did so with a reasoned analysis.

All I can say is that if one needs a role model for the “consummate professional,” one need look no further than “Judge Ron.”

Elliot Smith
Rarotonga, Cook Islands

Stop the madness now

The proposed rules and regulations in the public comment section are enough to make a lawyer’s head spin. With each new rule, we are increasingly hamstrung in our practice of law. We spend way too much time on CYA letters, we overwork the simplest of cases to insure that the client won’t sue us for failing to undertake some inane procedural tool that would have not changed the result anyway, and we are required to spend inordinate sums of money on technology-driven devices and services to ostensibly insure we avoid conflict and keep informed.

To add insult to injury, after being required to what amounts to churning a file, clients refuse to pay. With each new rule, you are giving another client another tool to sue his lawyer.

How are we to honestly, fairly and cost-effectively serve our clients’ needs, to fulfill our obligations to the court, to promote what used to be an honorable profession?

Stop the madness! You are over-regulating us!

Stephany Yablow
Studio City

Bias, not analysis

I object to identifying Erwin Chemerinsky’s article (August) as “Analysis.” It is opinion only and biased opinion at that. Please label it accurately.

John P. Hurabiell
San Francisco

Why the fuss?

I’m mildly surprised by the contretemps occasioned by Judge Dzintra Janavs’ election loss of her Superior Court seat to sometime attorney Lynn Olson. Why the fuss and why the debate over whether sitting judges should be required to be confirmed in their positions after a term of years? Other than Judge Janavs’ seat on the Los Angeles County Superior Court, no larger issues were at stake. That Judge Janavs is deemed highly qualified by her peers, and that her election loss is regretted by both the bench and the Los Angeles legal community at large is hardly a reason to change our system of appointment and retention of judges generally.

I think the present system is fair, and that requiring sitting judges to be held accountable to the electorate serves a worthwhile purpose. It is certainly preferable to lifetime appointment.

That elections may be subverted or abused by special interests or ideologues, or because the “wrong” people won, or because the voters did not properly assess the relative merits of the opposing candidates do not provide grounds for arguing that such elections should not be held.

Who knows, maybe Lynn Olson will turn out to be a decent judge after all.

Art Silen
Davis

Sticking it to the have-nots

It seems to me that any client interested in knowing what the direct or indirect limits of his or her attorney’s malpractice coverage may be would also be rightfully interested in: (1) that attorney’s personal ability to pay any judgment that exceeded their malpractice insurance limit; and (2) any limitations on the liability of that attorney’s firm or other partners due to its selected form of organization (i.e. true partnership versus LLP). This would be especially true in cases that involved the potential for a multimillion dollar judgment.

This would imply that all attorneys should really be required to: (1) disclose their personal net worth and future earning capacity (along with the proposed disclosure of malpractice insurance coverage); and (2) disclose the exact liability of their firm and other partners for amounts not covered by the offending attorney’s malpractice insurance, personal net worth and future earnings.

I doubt that the partners of most law firms would want to disclose their personal net worth and/or future earning capacity to their potential clients . . . even though these disclosures would clearly be relevant to the satisfaction of malpractice judgments in excess of their malpractice insurance limits.

Personally, I think this whole malpractice insurance disclosure issue boils down to the “haves” trying to stick it to the “have nots” (i.e. those that already “have” company-paid malpractice insurance to protect the personal assets of their attorneys —not their clients’ judgments — are perfectly willing to enact a rule requiring those who do not have malpractice insurance to have to say so).

Michael W. Szkaradek
Santa Ana

Recipe for mischief

The main points about the bar’s proposal for mandatory disclosure of insurance coverage are these:

(1) The members of the task force proposing this rule are all insured, so far as I know. They are therefore proposing a rule that they themselves will never need to obey. The task force considered requiring all attorneys, insured or not, to disclose the amount of their malpractice coverage, but this proposal was rejected as “too complicated.”

(2) The bar sometimes, through its certification programs, allows attorneys to advertise that they are better than other attorneys. This is the first time that attorneys would be required to advertise that they are, somehow, worse than other attorneys.

Rule 955 requires disclosure to clients by attorneys who have been suspended; the proposed rule would require attorneys with no disciplin-ary record at all to wear the scarlet letter.

(3) Perhaps the most odious requirement is a provision in the proposed rule that the uninsured attorney must notify the client, in writing, of the lack of coverage, and that the client must sign and return the notice to the attorney. Anyone who has tried to get a client to sign and return a simple document knows how difficult this is. Until that document is returned, the attorney can do nothing, cannot pick up a telephone, can not pick up a pencil, even if the client’s vital interests are at risk, without violating the Code of Professional Responsibility.

I can’t think of a better recipe for mischief.

Michael Mahoney
San Francisco