DIANE L. KARPMAN

Diane L. Karpman has been a leader in the field of lawyer ethics and discipline for decades. At times she has advised clients as diverse as the U.S. Department of Justice and Tom Girardi.

She won’t talk about them, of course. “The biggest duty that all lawyers owe to their client is confidentiality,” she said. “My lips are sealed.”

These days, she works from a home office, not always full time and without so much as a website to bring in clients. “At this point,” she said. “I’m only taking things that are very interesting.” She may also handle matters for attorneys she knows well and likes or who are involved with entities she helped set up years ago.

Karpman still does sometimes represent clients who have received an inquiry from State Bar prosecutors about a complaint. But she hasn’t represented a lawyer in a State Bar court trial “in decades,” she said. “I think you’ve already lost if there’s a trial at the State Bar.”

More often, she serves as an expert witness in legal malpractice matters or as an adviser on ethics, conflicts and disqualifications.

In fact, she spent about seven years as an expert witness advising federal prosecutors who pursued the prominent securities class-action firm of Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach throughout the 2000s for operating a kickback scheme to induce potential plaintiffs to sue.

Now, she is often brought on to advise attorneys on what they need to do to win a court appointment as lead counsel in a class action. “In a class action, there’s always a competition … [over] who’s going to be lead counsel,” she said.

Judges have a duty to name the most adequate firms or teams to that role. For a number of years, Karpman was often appointed by Los Angeles Superior Court judges to advise them on the process. These days, she advises firms on “how to present themselves, what factors to accentuate [and] … issues of experience” and even about what factors would work against their being appointed.

Now, 70% to 90% of her practice lately is advising clients on ethics-related issues more broadly, including class actions. Much of the advice concerns “how to stay out of trouble.”

Karpman served as the president of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers in 1999-00 and as president of the Beverly Hills Bar Association in 2013-14. She has served for about three decades on the Los Angeles County Bar Association’s ethics committee. And she is a member of the prestigious American Law Institute, which develops and publishes restatements, including the “Restatement of the Law Governing Lawyers.”

“It’s a tremendous honor to get to represent your peers,” Karpman said. “It really is an honor every day.”

– Don DeBenedictis