This item caught my eye from the Wednesday, March 14 agenda for the State Bar of California Audit Committee meeting:
Here is the PowerPoint deck attached to the agenda item:
The burning question is: why now? Since the enactment of the Certified Legal Referral Service statute (California Business & Professions Code section 6155) in 1987, there has been little enforcement activity by the State Bar of California. There was a flurry of activity in the late 1990s connected with the 1996 plebiscite on the continued existence of the State Bar, when the State Bar felt it had to show lawyers that it was actually doing something for them, not just to them. There was another limited run of enforcement activity after the Jackson v. LegalMatch decision in 2019 (42 Cal.App.5th 760). The Office of Chief Trial Counsel sent letters to a number of attorneys who had accepted referrals from the old uncertified LegalMatch, but no discipline ensued. The State Bar’s civil suit against LegalMatch was “quietly” settled in October 2022.
The natural result of this lack of enforcement activity is that uncertified legal referral services have proliferated like weeds in a vacant lot. Fans of late-night television have probably seen their ads, staged with obvious fake “boiler rooms” staffed by obviously fake lawyers “standing by to take your call!” on obviously fake telephones.
So, again, why now, especially after we know the State Bar of California decided in 2021 that “the Board declined proactive uncertified LRS enforcement activity due to resource limits”? Some have speculated that the public at large is getting genuinely tired of the seeming wall-to-wall attorney advertising that is saturating all media. Color me skeptical. The public has been subjected to this for years now.
I know of no particular Legislative impetus for this new possible enforcement push. If someone out there knows something, please let me know.
This is an aggressive and adversarial organization that is not really focused on “protecting the public”, imo vs. just gathering scalps. It is very judgmental. The prosecutors and investigators are underwhelming in quality and intelligence except for a few. The Cal. State Auditor told them to “disbar more attorneys” after the Girardi affair. That was their read-out. We need to abolish the OCTC and SBC and have the Supreme Court of California start from scratch. No one in the rest of the U.S., the other 49 states, none of these states has followed Cal.’s lead in having aj aggressive adversarial prosecutor with a court/judge framework. It has created a cottage industry and kangaroo court, the quality of OCTC prosecutors is very low, the RD judges are not very smart, a couple female HD judges ae good. This org is very strict and punitive toward lawyers, good lawyers, that goes way beyond “protecting the public”. It bankrupts them with fines and expensive adversarial proceedings, and the fines them $30K for the hearing! Bureaufascism.