The Sleazy Ethics of Too Many Lawyers
by Doug Schafer
Candidate for Washington State Supreme Court
(a 24-year business and personal planning lawyer)1. Too many lawyers, particularly trial lawyers, seem willing to do anything -- even cheat -- to win their cases. This must be checked by forceful leadership from the Washington judiciary and the State Bar. A 1994 article titled "Sleazy in Seattle" in a national legal newspaper, The American Lawyer, described shocking pre-trial discovery abuses -- what most people call "fraud" -- by Seattle's second largest law firm, Bogle & Gates, which had 240 lawyers before it decayed and folded in 1999. Basically the Bogle lawyers falsely denied that their drug company client had certain incriminating letters, but an anonymous source later gave copies to the opposing parties, who then appealed their unjust result. (Fisons Corp. v. Washington State Physicians Ins. Exchange)
The State Bar's reaction to the Washington Supreme Court's 1993 ruling strongly denouncing the Bogle firm's misconduct was to appoint, in 1994, Bogle's managing partner, Richard J. Wallis, to the State Bar's 14-member Lawyer Disciplinary Board, then to be its Vice Chair in 1995, then its Chair in 1996. Not surprisingly, no Bogle lawyer was disciplined for the fraud described in Sleazy in Seattle. A former Bogle trial lawyer told me in 2000 that our state's supreme court justices "don't understand litigation." I understand how it should work -- not how it does work.
2. Nearly everybody, it seems, jokes and complains about the lack of moral character among lawyers. A 1999 book by two practicing lawyers who also teach law school ethics courses has been very favorably reviewed, both for exposing the profession's problems and for proposing some reforms to address those problems. It is available at your nearest bookstore as well as through this link to Amazon.com (read its posted reviews):
"The Moral Compass of the American Lawyer: Truth, Justice, Power, and Greed,"Those two also authored a 1999 article, "Calculated Malfeasance," still posted on The American Lawyer's website about "discovery fraud" and the apparent ethical vacuum in the 1990s at Bogle & Gates, as shown by multiple cases. With Bogle's dominance, then its 1999 disintegration and the dispersion of its lawyers to other law firms, its institutional "ethics" has likely contaminated much of the state's legal community. But, the fact that Bogle's unethical practices were openly defended in 1990 in the Fisons Corp. case by over a dozen prominent Washington state trial lawyers (including several former presidents of the State Bar), that contamination appears to have been widespread well before Bogle's collapse. Ethics remediation is badly needed.
by Richard A.Zitrin & Carol M. Langford.3. As recently observed by former Washington State Bar Association (WSBA) president J.A. Vander Stoep of Chehalis in a letter titled, "WSTLA Packing WSBA Board?" in the State Bar News (5/2000), "[T]he members of the Washington State Trial Lawyers Association (WSTLA) have effective control over the governance of the WSBA." In the State Bar's elections of its board of governors, only about 20% of the members even vote, so it is easy for an organized group to take control. See the State Bar News (7/2000) letter titled "Voter "Turnout" for Governors’ Races Slim." And each State Bar governor picks a friend/colleague to serve on the State Bar's Disciplinary Board, which explains why prominent trial lawyers are rarely disciplined! All 23,000+ Washington lawyers are required to belong to the State Bar; and only about 3,300 belong to WSTLA.
I intend, if elected, to prod the judiciary and State Bar to raise the ethical standards of lawyers.