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Discipline charges filed against California lawyers have been public record for more than two decades, but it took phone calls, letters or visits to State Bar headquarters in San Francisco or Los Angeles to get the details.
No longer. State Bar governors voted 18-4 Friday to post pending charges on the organization's Web site for the world to see and for search engines to archive for years -- despite critics' allegations that it violated the principle of innocent until proven guilty.
"Since our charges are public when they are filed, there is no logical reason we shouldn't make those charges more easily available to the public," State Bar Chief Trial Counsel Scott Drexel said Thursday during a committee meeting in which most of the debate was held.
"If you were hiring an attorney," he told the Board of Governors' Committee on Regulation, Admissions and Discipline Oversight, "would charges pending against an individual be information you'd like to have? The answer has to be yes."
Not everyone agrees.
State Bar Governor Michael Marcus, a mediator and arbitrator for ADR Services Inc. in Los Angeles, called the posting of charges not yet proven "an unnecessary blow."
"Is what we are doing helping the profession or hurting the profession?" he argued during Thursday's session in San Francisco. "We already have this information in the public [domain]. What we are doing here is to highlight issues, highlight charges."
Attorneys who specialize in representing lawyers facing State Bar discipline charges echoed those concerns.
"Reputation is a lawyer's only capital," said Los Angeles attorney Diane Karpman, who pointed out that the L.A. County and Beverly Hills Bar associations oppose online posting.
Pointing to the State Bar's own statistics that 92 percent of all discipline charges wind up being proven, Karpman said that means the other 8 percent who have done nothing wrong will be subjected to humiliation for no reason.
"It's going to snare up all the innocent along with the guilty," she said.
Under the new plan, State Bar officials will post pending discipline charges on the attorney's personal profile page on the organization's Web site. Currently, that page only gives the lawyer's postal and e-mail addresses, telephone number, undergraduate and law schools, as well as whether the individual is actively practicing law and has been disciplined before.
For more information about previous discipline, members of the public have to call, mail or go to State Bar headquarters. But there is no mention about whether attorneys currently face charges.
Drexel pointed out in materials distributed to State Bar governors that pending discipline charges already are posted online by groups such as the Commission on Judicial Performance, which oversees judges, and the Medical Board of California, which disciplines doctors. He also noted that charges wouldn't be posted until the attorney in question had a chance to file a response or didn't respond at all.
George Davis, one of the board's nonlawyer members, said Thursday that he saw nothing wrong with posting information online that's already available to the public, although less conveniently.
"It's the same information," said Davis, who owns a management consulting service in Culver City, Calif. "This technology is moving fast anyway."
But San Diego lawyer David Carr, president of the Association of Discipline Defense Counsel, said that's part of the problem.
"There is something about this medium [the Internet] that lets people accept what they read" without giving it critical thought, he said Thursday. "It's going to lead to manipulation of information. It's going to lead to the spread of misinformation."
The proposal was approved by the Board of Governors' discipline oversight committee by a vote of 7-2, and referred to the full board for a Friday vote. But not before Marcus, a former State Bar Court judge, tried to block it by complaining that he and others on the board had only seen a compilation of the pro and con comments, not all that had been received.
"After all," he said, "what's the purpose of it going out for public comment if we haven't seen it all?" His attempt, though, to delay the vote until the September meeting failed.
Thirteen commentators, including the Center for Public Interest Law and HALT: Americans for Legal Reform, favored the idea, while 38 opposed.
When critics on the Board of Governors tried to postpone the vote again Friday, Bar Governor Bonnie Dumanis, the district attorney of San Diego County, said it was time to act now to prevent bad lawyers from "over and over again re-victimizing people."
Also on Thursday, the Committee on Regulation, Admissions and Discipline Oversight sent out for public comment a proposal requiring attorneys seeking to resign from practice to declare, under penalty of perjury, that they face no pending charges or criminal investigations. Five times in the last year, Drexel said, attorneys who were allowed to resign were discovered later to be under criminal investigation.
On Friday, the full Board of Governors approved a $10 increase in annual dues, going from $400 to $410 for active lawyers and from $115 to $125 for inactive members. The state Legislature has approved the increase, which is now awaiting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's signature.
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