LOS ANGELES — The State Bar of California has failed to effectively discipline corrupt attorneys, allowing lawyers to repeatedly violate professional standards and harm members of the public, according to a long-awaited audit of the agency released Thursday.
The audit of the State Bar was ordered last year by the Legislature in the wake of a Los Angeles Times investigation that documented how the now-disgraced attorney Tom Girardi cultivated close relationships with the agency and avoided discipline despite scores of complaints and lawsuits from cheated clients.
After the State Bar acknowledged its "mistakes" in handling complaints against Girardi, the Legislature mandated the public examination of the attorney discipline system.
The audit concluded that the State Bar failed to properly investigate some attorneys even as complaints poured in alleging misconduct, relied on confidential warning letters and other nonpublic methods that did little to deter misconduct, and has not dealt with the conflicts of interest between its regulatory staff and the attorneys whom the agency is to discipline and investigate.
Auditors cited the examples of specific attorneys with disturbing track records who received little or no discipline. None of the attorneys were named in the report. One attorney was the subject of 165 complaints over seven years, but auditors found many of the complaints were dismissed outright or closed after the Bar issued private letters to the lawyer.
"Although the volume of complaints against the attorney has increased over time, the State Bar has imposed no discipline, and the attorney maintains an active license," acting California State Auditor Michael Tilden said in a letter summarizing his office's findings.
Another unidentified attorney had been the subject of several complaints alleging a failure to give clients money from their settlements. "When the State Bar finally examined the attorney's bank records, it found that the attorney had misappropriated nearly $41,000 from several clients," Tilden wrote.
In a statement included with the audit, the chair of the State Bar's board of trustees, Ruben Duran, called the findings "profoundly eye-opening and troubling." Duran said the Bar had noted "the gravity of the deficiencies that the Girardi matter laid bare" and had already taken steps to implement a program to better police the misuse of client trust accounts.
Assemblymember Mark Stone, a Democrat, who is chair of the Assembly's Judiciary Committee, said he was troubled by the audit's findings and was "disheartened" that the Bar had for decades not focused "on its core mission to protect the public from unethical attorneys."
"Victims of unscrupulous lawyers should not be re-victimized by a State Bar that too often has protected those lawyers from full scrutiny," Stone said in a statement. "We will continue to push the Bar to get back to basics and reform its discipline system once and for all."
A top plaintiffs' attorney and prominent Democratic Party donor who gained reality TV fame alongside his third wife, Erika, on "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills," Girardi saw his Wilshire Boulevard law firm and reputation collapse in December 2020. The catalyst was a judicial finding that the 82-year-old had misappropriated $2 million from families of those killed in an Indonesian air crash. But evidence of additional misconduct during Girardi's decades of practicing law in California have since emerged, and in January, a State Bar court recommended the state Supreme Court disbar him.
That Girardi's serial misconduct went unchecked for decades has forced a reckoning among the legal establishment. In addition to the Bar's acknowledgment of mistakes in investigating the power attorney, the agency has also been conducting a broad investigation into whether its own employees or other agency insiders helped Girardi skirt scrutiny. That investigation is ongoing, a Bar spokesperson confirmed to The
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