Shutdown of Bar Complaint Hotline
If Gov. Pete Wilson has, indeed, made the observation attributed to him in your May 20 editorial--the bar is bloated and poorly managed--then not only is he correct but he is also demonstrating leadership, understanding and guts not displayed by previous governors.
The best evidence of the bar’s bloat and mismanagement is your observation that “the state bar is on the verge of collapse.” Many lawyers feel that, for the good of the legal system and the many, true professionals who devote their lives to it, a collapse of the existing bar will be an improvement.
In the meantime, it is not accurate to claim that Wilson’s position leaves “Californians without recourse against dishonest or incompetent lawyers.” Clients have--and will always have--the right to file suit “against dishonest or incompetent lawyers.”
In the 41 years that I have practiced law in this state, I have seen the state bar grow continually, while accomplishing less and less for either the public or the professionals who are its only source of (coerced) income. Let’s see if Wilson cannot improve this spreading bureaucracy by forcing a reorganization that will get the bar out of politics and back on the track for which it was originally intended.
JOHN R. BRODERICK
Redondo Beach
* If there was ever any doubt that California is the lawyer’s paradise, Wilson’s current shutdown of the State Bar’s complaint hotline and eventual shutdown of the bar itself should dispel any traces. As a physician, I pay hundreds of dollars more than lawyers’ “high” bar fees to the State Medical Board, which is expanding like bureaucratic crab grass. In California, attorneys can now continue their plundering and paralysis of a society being strangled by litigation without even the fear of a bar complaint.
It is more than slightly ironic that attorneys who run government, take our tax dollars and hunt you down quite efficiently for an unpaid parking ticket cannot seem to keep the bar complaint line open.
RICHARD B. WILLIAMS
Agoura Hills