California’s legal community, which with 266,000 lawyers is the nation’s largest, has long resisted a mandatory reporting law.
The murky provenance of high-end jewelry and the earrings that became a plot point in the downfall of high-flying lawyer Tom Girardi, husband of “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” reality star Erika Jayne.
The law varies from state to state, with some jurisdictions setting stricter or looser standards for the misconduct to be reported and Georgia and Washington using language that makes reporting a colleague an expectation but not a requirement. California first contemplated and rejected a mandatory reporting law in the 1980s. Its legal community traditionally regarded itself as too big and well-established to need guidance from an outside group like the ABA. Additionally, some lawyers felt it would be difficult to square with the state’s expansive confidentiality obligations, which bind a lawyer to keep secret any information he or she acquires through representing a client unless the client agrees otherwise.
Toby Rothschild, the former general counsel of Legal Aid Foundation of L.A., said the job of a lawyer is to represent clients.