There is a lot of information on the State Bar of California website. But one thing you will not find. You won’t find decisions from the Hearing Department of the State Bar Court.
The State Bar Court page has a link to Hearing Department decisions. But you won’t find any after January 2019. That is, you won’t find recent ones. Instead, you will see this:
Hearing Department decisions are accessible from April 2014 through January 2019, at which point they vanish. If you want to see a Hearing Department decision after January 2019, you will have to know the specific case number or Respondent’s name.
Not coincidently, January 2019 was when the State Bar’s new case management system, aptly named Odyssey, came online. The same Odyssey implicated in the recent disclosure of confidential information now conceded to be the result of a flaw in the software provided by Tyler Technologies, the State Bar vendor, and not the result of some nefarious hack.
Long ago in the mists of history, longer even than the nine years Odysseus wandered on the wind dark ocean sea, the Association of Discipline Defense Counsel (ADDC) asked then Chief Trial Counsel James Towery (now Judge Towery) to provide copies of the Hearing Department decisions. The reason was to educate defense counsel about what was happening in State Bar Court to better advise their clients on what to expect in State Bar Court litigation and obtain knowledge that might lead to better trials and more settlements. Only about 50% of respondents are represented by counsel in the State Bar Court and not all of them by members of the ADDC. Only two institutions are privy to the complete picture of what goes on in the State Bar Court, the Court itself and the prosecutor, the Office of Chief Trial Counsel (OCTC). Discipline defense counsel are like the blind men in the parable: a trunk here, a leg there but no overall appreciation for what the elephant was. Judge Towery readily agreed.
Later on, in 2014, the State Bar Court began publishing links to a monthly list of decisions from the Hearing Department, a rather lazy solution compared to the full access the State Bar Court affords to decisions published and unpublished from the Review Department. But a better solution in terms of allowing access to the public at large access and understanding of the work of the Hearing Department. And, most importantly, a solution that allowed access to the entire corpus of that work, the cases where OCTC was successful as well as the cases where OCTC was not successful, either because the recommended discipline was less than that advocated by OCTC or because OCTC failed to prove any part of its case, resulting in a dismissal of charges.
Transparency and the public’s right to know have been trumpeted by the State Bar in advocating many policies, including posting the notices of disciplinary charges on the State Bar’s website before those charges are proven and the posting of the Consumer Alert badges in ever-expanding categories of cases, most recently, cases involving felony convictions.
These measures serve to protect the public, it is argued, by alerting consumers of legal services that the attorney that they might be thinking of hiring presents a potential danger. But it also serves the State Bar’s purpose to assure the public and the profession that it is zealously working to protect them. For the same reasons, attorneys who have been publicly disciplined are subject to publicity regarding their discipline, including inclusion in the Discipline Reports published in traditional legal newspapers and, more recently, postings on LinkedIn.
Discipline defense counsel know they do because we often achieve good results for our clients at trial, sometimes including complete dismissals. But the second purpose, the public relations purpose, isn’t served by disseminating information regarding OCTC’s failures. Finding information on the cases that OCTC loses, including how far they fell short and why is difficult.
But the overall picture is murky. The State Bar does publish statistics in the Annual Discipline Report but no detailed information as to why cases filed in State Bar Court are resolved with no action. For instance, the Annual Discipline Report for 2020 contains an entry for cases closed by the State Bar Court with no action, with an explanatory footnote stating that this could occur for many reasons, including “(1) respondent was disbarred in another matter; (2) respondent was ordered inactive pursuant to Business and Professions Code section 6007(b); (3) respondent’s death, shortly before or after dismissal; (4) respondent’s resignation; (5) dismissal by OCTC; and (6) dismissal by State Bar Court.”
As you can see, those numbers are not broken down by the types listed in the footnote.
Moreover, while complete dismissals are relatively few, there are no statistics on the much larger number of cases where OCTC sought a higher level of discipline than was ultimately decided on by the Court. This information can only be understood by an examination of the decisions themselves.
When Odyssey went live in January 2019, we were told that it would lead to greater transparency because it would allow the publication of the entire State Bar Court docket in each case online. This is true but misleading. More information is not necessarily better information, and without access to all Hearing Department decisions in one place, it is impossible for outsiders to fully analyze just how well OCTC is doing, measured by the yardstick of success in State Bar Court. Undoubtedly, OCTC closely analyzes each Hearing Department decision to determine whether to appeal it to the Review Department.
This information should be easily obtainable. Yet efforts by defense counsel to obtain these decisions have so far met with no success. And because State Bar Court no longer publishes even links to the decisions, they remain hidden from public view, accessible only in the dockets of individual cases. This is odd given that Review Department decisions are easily accessible. Whatever the explanation, this is incompatible with a government agency that has made transparency and the public’s right to know a central argument for publicizing its work.