Joseph L. Dunn

Dunn launched a little-noticed project this year to develop working relationships between the State Bar and various federal, state and local police and prosecutorial agencies. Whether by sharing information or forming joint strike forces, the bar and law enforcement can catch defrauding lawyers early, rather than "wait till after they do their damage to innocent victims," he said.

It's a small step so far, with no major payoffs. But it shows the State Bar is "taking its rightful role in the family of law enforcement as a regulatory agency protecting the people of California from bad lawyers," he said.

Until Dunn arrived two years ago, bar officials didn't often talk of their agency as one devoted to catching a minority of bad lawyers rather than helping the many good ones.

But Dunn sees his major accomplishment over the past 18 months or so as changing the culture of the State Bar.

The effort began dramatically last summer with the sudden departure of the bar's chief discipline prosecutor after only 11 months on the job, followed by the firing of four senior supervisors from the prosecution office. The unstated reason was concern among legislators and bar governors over the decades-old backlog of discipline cases.

When Dunn announced the firings, he also ordered the bar to get rid of the backlog. He set a deadline for the end of 2011, and the bar met it.

Since then, he has focused primarily on moving the bar from a largely flat organizational model to a more vertical one, which he prefers. All departments now either report to him, his deputy, the chief financial officer or the general counsel. By law, the substantive work of the chief trial counsel office and the State Bar Court are outside that structure.

Now Dunn is working on the "micro" level of his reorganization, evaluating each activity, position and person. "I'm not willing to look at any work the bar does as acceptable in its current form," he said. "Every aspect will fall under the microscope before the reform is complete."

"The agency is just much better run," these days, said general counsel Starr Babcock, who has spent two decades at the bar in various executive posts. Dunn is "dynamic, almost too dynamic," noting he seems to work around the clock and is "a little bit of a micro-manager."

A former state senator, Dunn also has improved relations between the bar and Sacramento. Recently, he formed an informal research-and-development project with some insiders there and elsewhere to find alternate ways to fund legal services for the poor.

Dunn's most recent success is very easy to miss, but bar watchers consider it significant: He and his refocused State Bar got a bill through the Legislature last month that keeps lawyers' dues flat next year.

But unlike many dues bills over the years, AB 2685 doesn't command the bar to do or not do anything new or special. It is, in bar officials' words, "a clean bill."

- DON J. DEBENEDICTIS