Cal Bar 2008 Performance Review | PRELIMINARY RESULTS

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

Just in time for the CalBARFOON’s annual gath­er­ing– this year at the Grand Hyatt in San Diego, the Evil Esquire Bar Association’s actu­ar­ial depart­ment has released their pre­lim­i­nary find­ings regard­ing the State Bar of California’s dis­ci­pline sys­tem per­for­mance for the years 2004 through 2008.

Before we start, the text on the cover of the State Bar of California 2008 Annual Report is worth not­ing: “Public Protection | Administration of Justice | Member Services.”

First the good news, accord­ing to the Cal Bar, there were 161,729 lawyers actively “prac­tic­ing” law in California on December 1, 2008. This equates to 1 lawyer for every 226 humans in the state down from 242 humans per lawyer in 2004.

Now the bad news, from 2004 through 2008 the Cal Bar dis­ci­plined only 3.1 per­cent of the lawyers regard­ing whom they received com­plaints. During this period, only 0.8 per­cent of com­plaints received by the Cal Bar from con­sumers of legal ser­vices i.e., vic­tim clients, oppos­ing par­ties, etc. resulted in dis­ci­pli­nary action against the offend­ing lawyer.

Appalling! Obviously the only bar activ­ity they’re good at is “Member Services.”

The EEBA will release our final report and sta­tis­tics later this year. In the mean­time, review the Cal Bar’s 2008 Annual Discipline Report.

* * * * * * STATE BAR OF CALIFORNIA WARNING * * * * * *

In addi­tion to the fore­go­ing, EvilEsq.com has found that the vast major­ity of attor­neys the Cal Bar inves­ti­gates are employed by small firms or are solo prac­ti­tion­ers. Large law firms and lawyers who are part­ners or employed by large law firms are vir­tu­ally immune from Cal Bar reg­u­la­tion, the excep­tions being when fed­eral law enforce­ment has inter­vened. The only con­clu­sion we can draw from this is that California’s attor­ney dis­ci­pline sys­tem is highly polit­i­cal– read corrupt.

Consumers of legal ser­vices in California can­not rely on the Cal Bar to assist them in the event they become a vic­tim of, for instance, one of the 13,529 attor­neys com­plaints were filed against in 2008. Moreover, it’s very dif­fi­cult to dis­cern whether or not a lawyer has engaged in “mis­con­duct” or even ille­gal activ­ity because the Cal Bar does not pub­lish the com­plaints they “decline” to inves­ti­gate. California con­sumers “roll the dice” every time they retain a lawyer and one out of twelve times they will make the wrong choice.

While California cer­tainly ranks in the bot­tom quar­tile of U.S. “attor­ney dis­ci­pline” sys­tems, in our opin­ion, no state ade­quately pro­tects con­sumers. EvilEsq.com can help to equal­ize this prob­lem. If you’ve filed a com­plaint against an attor­ney that your state’s bar over­seers have “declined” to inves­ti­gate, for­ward it along with any exhibits thereto for our con­sid­er­a­tion for publication.

If you know of a lawyer who’s wor­thy of induc­tion to the EEBA? Send a brief sum­mary of the lawyer’s “qual­i­fi­ca­tions” along with his or her full name, state(s) of licen­sure and other iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion to vic­tims @ evilesq.com and, depend­ing on their con­duct, we’ll add them to our Nominee roles or Watchlist.

We strongly advise any­one con­tem­plat­ing hir­ing a California attor­ney use our LAWYER PROPHYLACTICS.

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