The State Bar is clearly NOT a business

Otherwise they would have acted differently!

I find it interesting that people scratch their heads about why lawyers fail to support the Bar. In California, Governor Pete Wilson vetoed a Bar dues bill which would have allowed the State Bar to send out its billings for that year. This is old news.

The new part of it is that the lawyers in the Bar failed to support the Bar en masse; if they had, the Governor would have had to relent. When Governor Wilson, with a very long memory for an old slight, got even with the Bar, there was no one there to defend the Bar.

The Legislature, under a new governor, adopted a bill; the Bar sent out its dues, a couple of years late, but still … better late than never.

As part of the bill, and the negotiation with the Bar that enable the adoption of the bill, law practice management was deleted as a designated category of education for MCLE.

Last year, a committee of the Board of Governors unanimously supported a resolution to re-designate law practice management as study category. For reasons not pertinent to this comment, the committee delayed sending the resolution to the full Board of Governors. Two weeks ago, that same committee reconsidered the resolution. Now the vote was 3-2 to kill the resolution and not send it to the full Board of Governors.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Lawyers in California spend 80% of their dues each year to support the California disciplinary system. More than 50% of all complaints against lawyers involved somre sort of management failure on the part of lawyers.

If studying management could reduce the number of complaints (and all evidence supports this), then the cost savings presumably would also enable a dues reduction.

And you say that that is too logical for a bureaucratic instituion, one that has no profit motive or measurement stick. And they wonder why lawyers fail to support their agenda.

Categorized in: Management