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A key state lawmaker says his colleagues should use their authority over the annual bar dues bill to “restructure” the fee schedule so high-salaried attorneys pay more than their lower-earning counterparts in the profession.

Assemblyman Mark Stone, D-Scotts Valley, told members of the Judiciary Committee, which he chairs, that bar leaders' pending request to the Legislature for a $100 annual fee hike—plus $330 in one-time assessments in 2020—is “our opportunity to take some of the regressive nature of that fee structure out.”

“That's where we could have the biggest effect on attorneys who are at the low end of the wage scale because not all attorneys are making as much money,” Stone said at a recent committee hearing. “And especially those attorneys where those firms are very large and expensive, and the firms pay for the fees anyway, I think there should be a lack of sympathy to the burden that that provides.”

Stone's comments came during a hearing on legislation that would make mandatory a now-optional $40 fee on lawyers' dues bills that funds legal aid programs. The committee advanced the legislation but not without a debate over the fairness of making all lawyers pay the same amount.

Forty dollars “represents about six minutes of work for the average big-firm attorney,” said Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, a former attorney at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights.

“The reality is, 90 percent of all attorneys work for the top 10 percent of America, which means that 10 percent of all attorneys represents everyone else,” Chiu continued. “And that's just not a situation that is tenable.”

In endorsing a $100 fee increase last month, state bar trustees directed staff to work on a scaling mechanism that would lower dues bills for attorneys who earn less, either based on their salaries or their household incomes. The bar's executive director, Leah Wilson, noted, however, that any discount for some lawyers would trigger higher charges for others to maintain the same revenue stream for the agency.

This year's fees bill, in its current form, calls for a dues charge of  an “unspecified amount” plus a 25 percent discount for active licensees with gross individual incomes of less than $60,478. Today, only lawyers with gross incomes of less than $40,000—just under 14,500 licensees fell into that category, according to a 2017 bar survey—qualify for a free break.

The Legislature has not increased licensees' fees, previously called dues, since 1998 despite bar leaders' regular pleas for more money to cover increasing labor costs and disciplinary workload.

In 2016, a dispute between the Assembly and the Senate—with the Assembly pushing for immediate changes to the bar's structure and practices—led to the Legislature failing to enact an annual fee authorization bill. The California Supreme Court authorized the bar to collect dues on an interim basis, and the full Legislature endorsed a new fee bill that included structural reforms to the agency in 2017.

“I know there's been a lot of pushback in this committee to this notion of increasing dues anyway,” Stone said at the Judiciary Committee hearing. “So it's our opportunity to restructure it. With that, I'm going to need your help … and I'm hoping we can come up with an approach that all of us can stand together. We've made some significant changes in the bar over the last couple of years by standing together.”

This year's fees bill is scheduled to be heard in the Senate Judiciary Committee on April 30. The state auditor is also expected to release a report on the agency's operations that day. Bar trustees will meet in closed session Tuesday to review a draft copy of that report.

The dues bill author, Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara, has said whether the bar gets the dues increase its seeking will depend in part on what that audit and an upcoming report from the legislative analyst's office say.

 

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