The following is my statement of opposition to The State Bar of California’s proposed rule requiring attorneys to disclose when they do NOT have professional liability (malpractice) insurance.
Should you have any comments or new ideas, please e-mail. (more…)
I recently attended the National Speakers Association’s annual conference in Orlando, FL, representing the Los Angeles chapter as its current president.
One of my colleagues, Sandra Shrift, described her “take-aways” from the conference. I echo her thoughts:
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Expert Click, the on-line Yearbook of Experts, posted my bio, along with showing several of my books, onto their site.
I’d welcome your feedback.
American Bar Association names new executive director. A new era for the largest volunteer association in the world is about to begin and its new leader certainly seems to be well qualified.
Today is the last day to take advantage of the pre-publication offer, to purchase our just-released book, More Secrets of the Business of Law: Ways to Be More Effective, Efficient and Profitable.
If you follow the advice set forth on these pages, you are guaranteed to have happier clients! … and make more money!
The July issue of LawBiz Tips has just been published and can now be seen at www.lawbiz.com.
A law firm was held to be a public figure. A law firm sued a legislator for defamation when the legislator said the law firm received exhorbitant, unauthorized amounts of money for work they didn’t perform and that the firm also exceed political contribution limits to a particular legislator. The politcally connected law firm was held by the state court to be a public figure which required that the law firm must meet an actual malice standard, thus making plaintiff’s case harder to prove. Read more about this in the current edition of ALM’s Small Firm Business.
In today’s USA Today, their survey shows that patient (you can read this as client) satisfaction is of greater concern in 2006 (51%) than in 2005 (44%). I suspect that the same trend is true for the legal profession (even if the numbers are different).
In "Talking Tech," the Wall Street Journal reports on a Microsoft study. The study suggests that productivity improves by 9% when workers have 3 monitors on their desk and can have various pieces of information they need immediately available on the screen as they work, without having to minimize the current screen and looking for additional information. An interesting conclusion. Of course, while productivity may increase, what about the cost of increased real estate? That is, to have 3 monitors on the same desk at one time, each worker will likely need a larger desk which means a larger office. Will this increased cost offset the savings of more technology?
Mike McKee of The Recorder wrote an interesting piece on the issue of insurance disclosure.
While I continue to oppose the adoption by California of this new provision, it is becoming clearer to me that there are competing interests at work. First, is the perception that the Bar is a licensing agency and protector of the public. That’s it. Second, there are the few, perhaps naive, lawyers who believe that the State Bar also owes a duty to its members.
Bars across the country in recent decades have leaned toward the first, to the almost total exclusion of the second. I had hopes that California had finally turned the corner and was placing its duty to the lawyer population at the top of its priority list, understanding that the public protector role had already been appropriately addressed (and will always be important, but not uppermost for the moment). (more…)
New Jersey lawyers are taxed in order to fund a doctors’ malpractice insurance fund. Wow! Talk about protecting the public! So why are we arguing about disclosure provisions and a false facade or merely apparent protection of the public in California?
Why aren’t we suggesting true protection of the public by putting some muscle behind the effort … money! Why don’t we create a State Bar insurance fund as they did in Oregon and provide real backing to the idea of public protection from miscreant lawyers? (more…)
Proponents say the insurance disclosure rules would help to protect the public from shoddy legal representation and ease the burden on members who pay $40 annually into a fund that covers uninsured attorneys. That fund pays out $6 million annually and its reserves are dwindling, according to former bar president John Van de Kamp.
Attorneys have 90 days to comment after the proposed rules are posted in the bar’s Web site. But some quickly expressed opposition.
Ed Poll, who runs LawBiz Management Co., and is a vice chair of the bar’s Council of Section Chairs, said any such requirement would be prohibitively expensive to sole practitioners and lawyers in small firms.
Moreover, he said, the proposal "does not protect the public."
"If the bar really wanted to protect the public, they would not stop at disclosure, they would mandate insurance," said Poll, whose Web site, www.lawbiz.com, displays comments from lawyers who are against the idea. "But if they did that, the know they would have a riot on their hands."
Written by Savannah Blackwell and Erin Park, Daily Journal Staff Writers … www.dailyjournal.com … June 20, 2006