Brion St. James, Esquire | WATCHLIST

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

The Evil Esquire Bar Asso­ci­a­tion is seek­ing pub­lic com­ment regard­ing the mis­ad­ven­tures of Cal­i­for­nia attor­ney Brion Leigh St. James, Esquire [#100538], prior to accept­ing nom­i­na­tions for his induc­tion into the EEBA. View Brion’s Cal­i­for­nia Bar pro­file here: [Brion St. James]

The fol­low­ing is the Cal­i­for­nia Supreme Court’s order that pre­cip­i­tated our adding Brion to our Watch­list.

April 3, 2009, DISCIPLINED by Cal­i­for­nia Supreme Court Case: S170190

The court orders that BRION L. ST. JAMES, State Bar Num­ber 181977, be sus­pended from the prac­tice of law for one year, that exe­cu­tion of the sus­pen­sion be stayed, and that he be placed on pro­ba­tion for two years sub­ject to the con­di­tions of pro­ba­tion rec­om­mended by the Hear­ing Depart­ment of the State Bar Court in its Order Approv­ing Stip­u­la­tion filed on Novem­ber 18, 2008.

The court orders that BRION L. ST. JAMES take and pass the Mul­ti­state Pro­fes­sional Respon­si­bil­ity Exam­i­na­tion within one year after the effec­tive date of this order. (See Seg­retti v. State Bar (1976) 15 Cal.3d 878, 891, fn. 8.)

Costs are awarded to the State Bar in accor­dance with Busi­ness and Pro­fes­sions Code sec­tion 6086.10, and are enforce­able both as pro­vided in Busi­ness and Pro­fes­sions Code sec­tion 6140.7 and as a money judgment.

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

Accord­ing to the State Bar of Cal­i­for­nia 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!

Each year, for­mal com­plaints are filed against 8.5 per­cent of California’s active lawyer pop­u­la­tion. 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.

Anec­do­tally, 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 our sur­vey of the Cal­i­for­nia dis­ci­pline sys­tem is that its 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 con­sumers filed for­mal com­plaints regard­ing in 2008. More­over, it is very dif­fi­cult to dis­cern whether or not an 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 is cer­tainly 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 have infor­ma­tion regard­ing the attor­ney men­tioned above please, com­ment on this post, rate the lawyer’s “evil­ity” and assist oth­ers to find EvilEsq.com and this post by using the ShareThis but­ton to post a link to EvilEsq.com.

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.