Bar fee bill signed by the governor
Gov. Brown has signed a measure to authorize a $10 rebate on all California lawyer dues and to change how the State Bar is
governed. SB 163 had earlier passed
both houses of the legislature by votes of 39-0 in the Senate and 68-9 in the
Assembly. The bar board of governors is expected to act on the bill Oct. 5 by formally setting the dues at the authorized level.
The $10 rebate means most
active lawyers will pay dues of $400 next year. The reduction is also available
to inactive lawyers, who will owe $115. A check-off box on the bill also will offer
the option of donating $20 to legal services for the next two years. The
current $10 check-off produced $1.6 million in 2011.
The
measure also calls for the transfer of $2 million in both 2012 and 2013 from
the bar’s insurance affinity program account (non-mandatory dues money) to
IOLTA-funded legal services programs.
The
biggest change, and one opposed by the majority of the board of governors, will
alter how many members the board has, how they’re chosen and how long
they’ll serve. (The board will be called the board of trustees in the
future.) The
board will shrink from 23 to 19, with six elected lawyers (one from each Court
of Appeal district), five lawyers appointed by the Supreme Court and two more
lawyer appointments by the legislature. The number of public members will
remain at six. Attorneys can be elected or appointed to one additional term but
terms of the public members will be unlimited.
Creation
of a six-person governance task force, opposed by many on the board as a kind
of divisive super-board, is postponed for one year.
Bar president Jon
Streeter asked the governor to sign the bill in a Sept. 19 letter, noting that
concerns about the measure raised by the board of governors “ultimately
went unaddressed.” Nonetheless, he wrote, the bill “reflects a
series of thoughtful and practical compromises” including increased
funding for legal services for the poor. “I believe that importance of avoiding any disruption
to bar operations — which would seriously damage the bar’s ability
to fulfill its core regulatory mission — outweighs any shortcomings that
the bill may have,” Streeter wrote.
Streeter was referring to a seven-point memo that
directed Executive Director Joe Dunn and bar lobbyist Jennifer Wada to seek
amendments to SB 163 that included leaving the board membership at 23,
standardizing three-year terms for all board members and eliminating the
governance task force. Although the legislature did not agree to ending the
task force, it delayed creating a new governance group for a year.
It also created a
conflict of interest provision like that applied to members of other state
boards that prohibits an individual who has “a close family member”
who is a licensee of an agency from serving on that agency's board. That means any
non-lawyer married to a lawyer cannot serve on the bar board in the future. The
provision does not affect current public members.