REGULARS

The State Bar Court, buffeted by a series of setbacks over the last six years, is slowly getting back on its feet and seems on the road to stability. Responsible for disciplining attorneys, the bar court came under fire from a blue ribbon panel in 1994 for its “gold-plated” operations, suffered the reversals visited on the entire bar by Gov. Pete Wilson’s 1997 veto of the fee bill, and finally was the subject of legislation — challenged unsuccessfully before the Supreme Court last year — which changed the way its eight judges are appointed.

With the arrival of three new judges and a caseload that is returning to normal, the court seems to be back up to speed.

“I think the court now is relatively stable,” says James Obrien, presiding judge for five years. “But I think there are some aspects of our fundamental role that are very fragile, and the political machinations that have gone on have really exploited that fragility. We need to be able to do our thing for a period of time in order to stabilize the court.

“We must always be concerned whether the legislature will again intrude into the operations of the court.”

When the bar shut down most of its departments in 1998, the court completed all cases it had set for trial but abated almost everything else. Already streamlining its staff, it was forced to lay off even more employees, and the eight judges shared the salaries of three over the course of the bar’s shutdown.

Obrien said it is “difficult to overestimate” the effect of Wilson’s veto on the court. “It was enormously disruptive to the operations of this court and to the discipline system,” he said. Because the court is a responsive body, he added, it did not really experience a vacuum in its work until after the shutdown ended, when it began to feel the effects of a dearth of cases.

As the bar’s Office of Trial Counsel files more cases, the court’s workload has increased correspondingly, and Obrien says the caseload now is close to normal.

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A federal appellate court dealt a blow to the Washington state IOLTA program last month, ruling that using interest from lawyer trust accounts to fund legal services programs amounts to a taking of client’s money.

But the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to the lower court for a determination on how to compensate clients, saying that just compensation for individual clients “could be zero.”

The impact of the decision on the California bar’s IOLTA program, which distributes $11 million a year to 100 legal services programs, was not immediately clear.

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After 10 years of aggressively fighting a challenge to the way the State Bar spends lawyer dues, the board of governors decided last month to drop its appeal of a ruling that found some bar activities should not be funded with mandatory fees.

The decision reflects a significant change in the way the bar now pays for several of its once-controversial programs. In addition, bar leaders believe they won the majority of issues in the case of Brosterhous, et al. v. the State Bar of California, and the remaining issues are moot.

The handful of programs targeted by Sacramento Superior Court Judge Morrison England in his 1999 ruling now are supported by voluntary financial contributions.

“The ultimate verdict in this case was of such a limited scope that the board has decided an appeal is unnecessary,” said bar President Palmer Madden. “This case was about the way the bar was 10 years ago. We’re a different bar today.”

When California assistant attorney general Raymond Brosterhous and 42 other plaintiffs sued the bar in 1992, they challenged the use of mandatory fees to fund each of the bar’s 30 program categories, including attorney discipline.

The plaintiffs, represented by the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, argued that use of mandatory fees to promote programs with which bar members disagreed violated their First Amendment rights.

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Until his August retirement as a Santa Clara County public defender, Zach Ledet handled a full caseload that routinely included making five to 10 appearances a day on behalf of his juvenile clients. For the last 15 years, he devoted another 10 hours a week to a second, unpaid job: helping young parolees from the California Youth Authority stay out of trouble.

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