SUSAN L. MARGOLIS

Susan L. Margolis describes her and her partner’s work, to a certain extent, as acting as a buffer between California attorneys and the State Bar.

One aspect of that buffering, especially in the last few years, has been serving as a sort of ethics hotline.

“We usually give free consultations,” Margolis said. When lawyers receive a letter from the bar about a potential discipline matter, they often become quite anxious. “They’re sure this is only happening to them and nobody else,” she said. Even when the issue is minor, they fear they could be disbarred.

“We’re there first just to calm people down and demystify the process for them” by explaining the steps that bar investigations usually go through.

One big source of calls is the bar’s new Client Trust Account Protection Program, which requires lawyers to certify they are in compliance with all statutes, rules and prohibitions related to trust accounts and the safekeeping of client funds. “I can’t tell you how many calls we’ve gotten from panicked people,” Margolis said.

Another side of acting as a buffer “is pushing back against the bar as much as we can to try to protect people.”

That has become especially significant since the revelations in 2020 that nationally famous plaintiffs’ attorney Thomas Girardi had apparently stolen millions of dollars from clients over the years and that the State Bar had seemingly brushed aside more than 200 disciplinary complaints against him.

Margolis said this has been the largest scandal involving the bar in her 36 years of practice. “The bar’s a political animal, and whenever they get any kind of bad press, they immediately spring into action, which usually has nothing to do with why they got the bad press in the first place,” she said. This time, “they’re going hyper on everybody for every little thing.”

For instance, Margolis is waiting for a bar court judge’s decision in a recent trial of a solo practitioner who, in her view, simply made some simple trust account errors and bounced some checks. The bar conducted an audit and is seeking to have her client suspended. “We had to go to trial because we could not get an offer of settlement that would not decimate this person’s practice.”

Also new, she said, bar prosecutors are often arguing that a repeat conviction for driving under the influence involves moral turpitude, allowing for disbarment. “The caselaw says that’s not a moral turpitude per se offense, but they keep arguing that point in drunk driving cases,” she said.

Bar prosecutors are “looking for Girardi-type behavior with everyone, and there’s very few attorneys out there raping and pillaging with such abandon,” Margolis said with a laugh. “Everybody else is just trying to get by.”

– Don DeBenedictis