Unethical lawyers should be reported

We know that it sometimes seems as if there are even more of them, in this litigious state within a litigious nation, but there are about 266,000 lawyers in California.

As in all professions — perhaps more than most — they must interact with their peers all of the time. They know each other’s fields of expertise, their strengths and weaknesses, and, yes, their reputations.

And yet California is the only state in the nation that does not mandate — or strongly encourage — attorneys to report other attorneys they suspect of wrongdoing.

No one wants to work within a profession that encourages persnickety backbiting over trivial matters.

But because of the financial leverage lawyers often have over their clients, and because of the arcane nature of their work that can leave the rest of us in the dark, attorneys are in an unusual position of power in our society.

That’s why when other lawyers see something, they need to say something.

And the good news is that it looks as if California is on its way to joining the other 49 states in requiring attorneys to report misconduct they have witnessed.

In the wake of a Los Angeles Times investigation into the financial misdoings of the late Los Angeles trial attorney legend Tom Girardi, Sen. Tom Umberg, D-Orange, himself an attorney, introduced last month legislation that would require California lawyers to report misconduct.

SB 42 would “require a licensee of the State Bar who knows that another licensee has engaged in professional misconduct that raises a substantial question as to that licensee’s honesty, trustworthiness, or fitness as an attorney in other respects, to inform the State Bar.”

That’s simple enough — and long overdue.

The investigation showed that the vastly wealthy Girardi, whose wife starred on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” was so very rich precisely because he stole money from clients. And the State Bar was actually informed about this bad actor. But trial lawyers, because of their wealth and often because of how they got it, protected their own by hosting bar bigwigs with what one headline called “Vegas parties, celebrities and boozy lunches.” The bar kept confidential that Girardi had been subject to “a jaw-dropping 205 complaints over his career, with more than 150 coming before the bar ever took public disciplinary action against him.”

So, while we certainly support the new bill mandating reporting of misconduct, clearly there has to be more oversight of the State Bar itself. Because the California Supreme Court oversees the bar, and it has dropped the ball as well. The outgoing chief justice of the court has now acknowledged its real failures, most egregiously when looking into the doings of rich and powerful lawyers in the state, and promises that will change.

“We’ll take the lessons learned from the years and hundreds of Girardi complaints and find a way to have an effective audit that really permits them to go forward with credibility,” outgoing Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye told the Times.

The clients Girardi stole from, and maintained his high-flying lifestyle through, included those injured from toxic pollution and bad pharmaceuticals, and even the Indonesian widows and orphans whose family died in the crash of a Boeing jetliner.

There were very likely other lawyers who knew of Girardi’s malfeasance. Let’s force attorneys to report wrongdoing — under penalty of law.