ARTHUR L. MARGOLIS

Arthur L. Margolis and his partner focus their practice largely on defending lawyers in State Bar disciplinary matters. The big problem for them lately is what he calls “the post-Girardi effect.”

The bar has become “hyper-politicized” and turned hyper-tough on the lawyers it polices, he said. “It’s a public relations pretext to divert attention from its own gross mishandling of the Girardi mess,” Margolis said.

The mess is the revelations beginning in December 2020 that nationally prominent plaintiffs’ attorney Thomas Girardi had stolen millions of dollars from clients over 40 years even as the bar took no action despite an eventual total of 205 disciplinary complaints against him. He was finally disbarred in July.

Now, Margolis said, bar prosecutors are “doing as much as they can to give the appearance of taking a hard line” against other attorneys “so that they won’t be criticized.”

That effect is especially playing out in two ways, he said. One is in cases involving lawyers who have been convicted of a crime, where he believes prosecutors now seem to have a policy to overcharge moral turpitude.

A finding that a lawyer committed a felony involving moral turpitude results in summary disbarment. Under a relatively new law, even if the elements of an offense do not involve moral turpitude per se, it can be found in the circumstances surrounding a particular crime.

Now, the bar is claiming moral turpitude in many cases. For instance, Margolis is representing a lawyer convicted of gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, which, he said, is not a crime involving moral turpitude per se. “We’ve been required to explain the legal background and nature and the very concept of moral turpitude” to the prosecutors, he said. “It’s not just a question of how do you feel about [the crime]. It’s a legal concept.”

Margolis stressed that not all the attorneys in the bar’s prosecution office have trouble with that concept. Some are very good and “absolutely reasonable.”

The other major issue California lawyers are facing as a result of the Girardi scandal is the bar’s new Client Trust Account Protection Program. It effectively demands “accounting perfection” from lawyers, Margolis said, because they must soon certify that they are in compliance with all statutes, rules and prohibitions related to their trust accounts and the safekeeping of client funds.

“We’re getting a lot of calls from attorneys who are more anxious than we’ve ever heard, anxious and really angry,” he said. “I don’t think the bar understands how explosive it is out there right now.”

The most common worry he hears about the program comes from lawyers who’ve realized they have some money in their trust accounts but don’t know now who it belongs to. “The bar has no answer for that,” he said.

“My answer is that we don’t know how the bar’s going to handle that except that the bar is going to have to come up with a solution because [otherwise] they’re going to have to prosecute half of the profession.”

– Don DeBenedictis