Legal Pad

Dermody to Keep Court Funding on Front Burner

[Scott Graham]

Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein partner Kelly Dermody was sworn in as the Bar Association of San Francisco's 99th president Thursday, vowing to continue BASF's efforts to support court funding while emphasizing diversity in the profession and legal services for the poor.

"California is regrettably part of a national trend of defunding state courts," Dermody told about 500 lawyers and judges at the Four Seasons Hotel. "I can assure you that right now people are standing in long clerk's lines around the state" seeking critical orders to block evictions or restrain perpetrators of domestic violence.

BASF formed three task forces last year to support San Francisco Superior Court as it faced laying off 175 employees and closing 25 courtrooms. The court eventually negotiated a $2.5 million loan from the Administrative Office of the Courts that saved 100 jobs and 14 courtrooms. It was "a viable short-term solution, but this work is not done," Dermody said.

Minority Bar Coalition Honors Diversity Champs

[Scott Graham]

The San Francisco Bay Area is known for its diversity of people and culture. It's no different with lawyers -- the Minority Bar Coalition of the Greater Bay Area spans a network of more than 25 bar associations organized by race, gender, ethnicity, religion, national origin and sexual orientation.

The coalition is dedicated to working together to advance the cause of diversity in the legal profession, and on Nov. 14 it presented its Unity Awards at UC-Hastings to representatives who've helped advance that goal.

This year the awards went to Billy Chan (Asian American Bar Association), Fairuz Abdullah (Bay Area Association of Muslim Lawyers), Timothy Cahn (Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom), Stuart Plunkett (Bar Association of San Francisco), Candice Petty (Black Women Lawyers of Northern California), Gordon Greenwood (California Association of Black Lawyers), Jason Clay (Charles Houston Bar Association), Nicole Harris (California Minority Counsel Program), Ruben Sundeen (East Bay La Raza Lawyers Association), Genevieve Dong (Filipino Bar Association of Northern California), Nahal Iravani-Sani (Iranian American Bar Association), Kristina Chung (Korean American Bar Association), Judge Angela Bradstreet (Queen's Bench), Mica Estremera (San Francisco La Raza Lawyers Association), Sharon Godbolt (Santa Clara County Black Lawyers), Eugene Flemate (La Raza Lawyers of Santa Clara County), Miruni Soosaipillai (South Asian Bar Association), Thanh Ngo (Vietnamese American Bar Association), Tara Flanagan (Women Lawyers of Alameda County)

Click on picture for larger image. Left to right: Soosaipillai, coalition co-chair Vidhya Prabhakaran (kneeling), Petty, Chung, Plunkett (kneeling), Godbolt, coalition co-chair Yuval Miller, Bradstreet, coalition representative Demetrius Shelton, Harris (and son), Ngo, Abdullah, Clay, Iravani-Sani, Sundeen, Dong, Cahn, Flanagan and coalition co-chair Ann Nguyen.

Monterey Bar Honors Former 6th District Justice Nat Agliano

[Kate Moser]

So many people showed up at a Monterey County Bar Association lunch honoring former Sixth District Justice Nat Agliano on Thursday that more tables and chairs had to be brought in.

Current and former Monterey judges and lawyers, plus a big gathering of Sixth District justices and his current colleagues at the Silicon Valley JAMS office, turned out to see Agliano accept a lifetime achievement award from the bar association. (Pictured here with Agliano are, from left, Justices Nathan Mihara, Patricia Bamattre-Manoukian, and Wendy Clark Duffy). The low-key jurist looked rather uncomfortable amid all the attention, and when Duffy introduced him, she showered him with praise almost apologetically.

“I know you’re almost reluctantly here because you’re so modest,” she said.

Agliano’s former colleagues on both the appellate and trial court benches said he has always been a great person to work with.

Bamattre-Manoukian said Agliano showed her the ropes when she first joined the Sixth District. “He’s a kind, gracious, smart, engaged jurist,” she said.

“You write something really good,” she ordered.

Another one of Agliano’s mentees, retired Judge Richard Silver -- who’s now also at JAMS -- said Agliano was a steadying influence on the Monterey court. He said Agliano helped him as a young judge when he was assigned some high-profile cases involving labor strikes led by Cesar Chavez.

“When you say Nat Agliano, it’s the same as saying ‘gentleman,’” he added.

There was one anecdote about a time that Agliano was not so calm and genteel. As Duffy told the story, Agliano, an avid golfer, had bought a new driver with plans to take it out over the weekend. The following Monday, the court’s veteran clerk and administrator, Michael Yerly, asked him how it went.

“Well, it’s in the lake,” Agliano replied.

Duffy said she wished someone had been there to snap some video of the even-keeled judge losing his cool on the golf course. “I think that would have gone viral on YouTube,” she said.

When the honorary lunch crowd cleared out of the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, Agliano stood, smiling, and said he had a good time. Not so much because of the lifetime achievement award, he said, but because it’s nice to see the legal community get together.

“It’s good for morale,” he said.

 

Branch leaders: It's time to gamble on new court funding

[Cheryl Miller]

Three days into the simultaneous conventions of the State Bar and the California Judges Association, the leaders of both groups – plus the visiting chief justice – have synched their talking points.

Their message to Long Beach convention-goers has been clear: The courts’ financial situation is horrible. Next year will be worse unless the governor and lawmakers restore some money. The judicial branch taking an unfair share of state reductions. The branch is not like the DMV or another state agency. It deserves a guaranteed funding source to avoid the annual budget battles.

Such a measure “would embed into our state constitution a mandatory indexing formula designed to fundamentally change how the justice system is funded,” new State Bar President Jon Streeter said.

"We need a new funding mechanism," added David Rubin, the newly minted president of the California Judges Association.

No one was offering specifics. Like who would pony up for an initiative campaign. Or why voters, who have historically ranked courts right down there with prisons in funding importance, would give the judiciary special treatment.

“We feel that the gravity of the problems of the judicial branch is not fully understood,” said Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye.

Returning the branch’s good friend SAL would help a lot, too, she added. SAL, or state appropriations limit, was an automatic growth factor that boosted trial courts'funding annually without a demonstrated need. From 2000 to 2006 that factor averaged 5.3 percent – a tidy sum that added tens of millions annually. But when the budget crisis hit in 2009, the Legislature revoked the courts’ SAL.

Restoring SAL would be an impressive feat, especially with the governor signaling that the budget is likely to include more spending cuts next year. But Cantil-Sakauye didn’t appear fazed Saturday when she referenced her past as a blackjack dealer in preparing for the fight ahead.

“I always note the wager,” she said, “but I wait and watch for the tell.”.

 

Class Dismissed for Substitute Teacher Vaughn Walker

[Scott Graham]

When the Alameda County Bar Association approached Vaughn Walker about keynoting its annual dinner, the outgoing chief judge of the Northern District asked what he should talk about. Bar association member James Wood of Reed Smith suggested Walker share what he learned in 21 years on the bench.

“How long do I talk?” Walker asked.

“About 10 minutes,” Wood told him, as Walker recounted it Thursday for several hundred ACBA members at Berkeley's Hotel Shattuck Plaza.

Noting that worked out to 30 seconds per year, Walker boiled it down to four lessons:

New Districts for Bar Races

[Mike McKee]

By a vote of 13-6 Saturday, the State Bar Board of Governors re-jiggered its voting districts for more equitable representation. The approved changes will, among other things, reshape two Bay Area districts — this despite opposition by the Santa Clara County Bar Association and others around the state.

In the Bay Area, District 3, which included Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, will now consist of only Alameda and Contra Costa, and lose one of its two governor positions. Santa Clara will now be all by itself in a brand-new District 6.

District 4, which included Marin and San Francisco counties, will now contain San Mateo County.

District 3 will now have 13,367 lawyers and District 4 will have 27,228 attorneys, a ratio of 13,614 lawyers per each of the latter district’s two governors.

Although redistricting is mandated every 10 years by the state Legislature, some bar associations vehemently opposed the plan passed Saturday. The Santa Clara County Bar Association felt that its longtime shared district with three other counties worked fine, while the Ventura County Bar Association complained that lumping Ventura and Santa Barbara counties in with the much more lawyer-populated Orange County would put the smaller counties at a disadvantage.

Five-Way Race for Bar Prez

[Mike McKee]

By any standards, it’s a full-on race.

State Bar Executive Director Judy Johnson announced Saturday that five members of the State Bar Board of Governors intend to seek the presidency.

Candidates, alphabetically, are William Hebert, a partner with San Francisco’s Calvo & Clark; Rex Heinke, a partner in the Los Angeles office of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld; Paul Kramer Jr., an administrative law judge for the Sacramento-based California Energy Commission; Michael Marcus, a mediator and arbitrator for ADR Services Inc. in Los Angeles; and Patricia White, a partner in Littler Mendelson’s San Jose office.

The other members of the State Bar Board of Governors will choose the new president during their July 24 meeting in Los Angeles. The winner will be sworn in by California Chief Justice Ronald George in Monterey on Sept. 25 during the organization’s annual meeting, and will replace outgoing State Bar President Howard Miller, a partner with Los Angeles’ Girardi & Keese.

State Bar Aims to Protect Itself Against Criticism of JNE

[Mike McKee]

State Bar governors are getting tired of taking the blame for the JNE Commission’s bobbles — such as leaking judicial nominees’ ratings or issuing ratings that discount a person’s full experiences.

So they’re talking about taking the bull (headed) JNE by the horns.

During a State Bar Board of Governors committee meeting this morning, ideas were thrown out beyond those suggested in an interim report by a State Bar task force, which already recommended making ratings of trial judges more transparent, changing the “not qualified” rating to something less demeaning and quickly naming a committee to investigate leaks when they happen.

Among the ideas discussed: Change the composition and numbers of the current 3-person panel that reviews JNE Commission ratings, and issue a statement that ratings not be limited to a nominee’s legal work experiences.

BASF Takes Aim at Arizona, Too

[Pam Smith]

Last week we took note of a story by one of The Recorder’s affiliates, the New York Law Journal, about a couple of New York-based groups calling for a boycott of an ABA conference in Phoenix next week. Their aim was to express opposition to Arizona's controversial new immigration law.

Well in the course of reporting for an update today, our NYLJ colleague Nate Raymond checked in with the Bar Association of San Francisco and heard that it, too, is on the boycotting bandwagon. This is what he heard, via e-mail, from BASF President Arturo González:

You are correct. We decided yesterday that given the draconian new law, our team will not be attending the conference. In addition, I will be presenting a resolution to our executive committee on Friday asking our bar to boycott the state and to encourage our members, their firms, and other bars to do the same.

(We might add: A BASF spokeswoman later clarified to Nate Raymond that the decision referred to above was not the result of a vote.)

Photo credit: Wing-Chi Poon/Wikimedia Commons

SF Bar Association Advocating for New Generation of Women in Law

[Petra Pasternak]

When Orrick partner Pat Gillette, who earned her JD in 1976, first entered the legal profession, she and other women knew they had to be tough to make it in what was then a near-total Man’s World. Today, discrimination is more covert, Gillette says, but women, especially the Gen Y, aren’t as primed for the fight.

To help women along the path to power, the San Francisco Bar Association is rejuvenating its No Glass Ceiling initiative this year. One goal is to increase the number of women in leadership and power positions to 30 percent by 2015. And by ‘power,’ the task force doesn’t mean ‘head of the summer associate committee,’ Gillette says. It’s got its eyes on titles such as ‘head of litigation,’ or member of the executive or compensation committee.