A recent example. I was promised — more precisely, threatened with — expeditious handling of my motion for reconsideration of the State Bar Court's denial of my motion to dismiss the Notice of Disciplinary Charges. Eleven days passed after parties completed all filings. So much for expedited handling. Sometimes the opposite of expeditious handling serves the Office of the Chief Trial Counsel. Here, the State Bar Court aided that office to try to proceed to deposition before my motions tested the NDC. The court tried to give the Office of the Chief Trial Counsel the fishing expedition it wanted. If the Hearing Department decided it had to grant my motion to dismiss — the Rules of Procedure and at least six Supreme Court decisions directly require it — the Hearing Department would help the Office of the Chief Trial Counsel place another NDC in its stead. The Hearing Department would try to make sure the Office of the Chief Trial Counsel had the facts it needed, by allowing their collection before the case is at issue. The Hearing Department tries to minimize the respondent's rights, within the scope of reasonable minimization of the probability of reversal.
I had turned the legal tables on the State Bar, however, by basing my opposition to the motion to compel on the NDC's pendency. My opposition to the motion to compel arrived at the State Bar offices this Monday. That same day, the court issued its denial of my motion to reconsider. This rate of response is not a typical Hearing Department response rate; never, ordinarily, on the same day. I cannot explain timing so responsive, except where the Office of the Chief Bar Counsel pointed the Hearing Department to my connecting the two pleadings.
These observations may fall short of the standards for admissible evidence, but the prior question is: do the usual rules against ex parte communication actually govern the State Bar? To the contrary, do the judges of the Hearing Department regularly confer informally with State Bar counsel? Are they then violating any rule or statute; do they know it?
Besides the obvious nexus between these two departments of the State Bar Court, aspects of public policy that actually encourage ex parte communication between these departments provide another reason to doubt the State Bar feels constrained to avoid ex parte communication with Hearing Department judges. In Los Angeles, the Office of the Chief Trial Counsel and the Hearing Department of the State Bar Court reside respectively on floors four and five of one office building. Without knowing which, one must question either the wisdom or the intent of such propinquity. The physical arrangement alone bespeaks an enormous public-policy confusion and indecision regarding State Bar Court judges' independence from the Office of the Chief Trial Counsel.
An additional policy nexus between these departments of the State Bar — Hearing Department judges have been known to receive jobs as Chief Trial Counsel, the judges themselves seeking out the job change, because they consider the prosecutorial position a promotion. The Chief Trial Counsel is the quarterback of the State Bar team.
Decisional law construing administrative law guarantees an independent hearing in an administrative law court. The Supreme Court based that guarantee on its interpretation of relevant Government Code sections, which established standards for administrative law courts. The State Bar Court, similar in function to courts like those charged with disciplining physicians, has the trappings of an administrative court. However, the State Bar Count is not an administrative court; to the State Bar court, the laws governing administrative courts do not apply, and the decisional law interpreting those statutes does not apply. For the State Bar Court is a sui generis organization, from which status stems a considerable part of its mischief, as no well-construed body of law regulates it. Nowhere in the general appellate case law do you find any holdings imposing (or denying) the right of a State Bar Court respondent to enjoy freedom from bias by private communications from the Office of the Chief Trial Counsel. The Rules of Procedure of the State Bar Court expressly exclude the Government Code and the Code of Civil Procedure from applying to Bar case. A review court typically invokes those bodies of code in finding error due to ex parte communication.
In totality, however, the State Bar's governing law clearly bans ex parte communication with the judge, although no procedure is in place to effect that ban or even to reiterate it. For although the State Bar is charged with enforcing the Rules of Professional Conduct, in its own practice the Enforcement Division is particularly prone to ignore them. Rule 5-300(B) states that "A member shall not directly or indirectly communicate with or argue to a judge or judicial officer upon the merits of a contested matter pending before such judge or judicial officer … " We on the outside of the State Bar Establishment, however, have no way of knowing whether the State Bar often abides by this rule or regularly breaches it. From appearances, it not only breaches the rule but also is aware of the transgressions only to such a degree that it refrains from admitting them. The State Bar takes few pains to keep the collaboration opaque to inference.
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