On April 9, the State Bar Ethics Committee (generally known by its acronym, COPRAC) held its 20th annual symposium in downtown San Francisco. The first program of the day was entitled “Who’s Running the Profession? The Future of Rules-Making and the Disciplinary Process.” In a neat bit of déjà vu, the symposium planners used the same title as one of the sessions at the very first COPRAC ethics conference in 1995, at a time when I was COPRAC chair.
The four panelists came to a clear though depressing consensus: that after 20 years, as moderator Larry Doyle put it, the bar has “come back full circle.” Robert Hawley, a long-time bar factotum who had been a deputy trial counsel, then COPRAC’s chair and special advisor while in private practice, then deputy executive director, acting executive director, and briefly, acting chief trial counsel, called the circumstances “a merry-go-round” in which “we’re seeing the same scenery over and over.” Somewhat more tongue-in-cheek, he opined that “everyone’s running around naked, [thinking] they’re in charge, while nobody is.”
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