Sorted by Commenter - Ethics - State of California

alone seek to prohibit , no version or
nonrefundable retainer" appear even once in any of these materials.
Moreover, even if the materials had provided some sort of information about their
efforts to abolish nonrefundable retainers, many, if not most, of those materials would not
have afforded concerned members of the Bar day
comment period scheduled to end on June 6, 2008. The brief notices for a public hearing
on "Proposed Amended Attorney Rules of
Los Angeles Daily Journal the Recorder and the Sacramento Bee for example, were
first published on May IS, just a week prior to the May 22
itselfwas only two weeks prior to day comment period.
It is therefore hardly
Sacramento lawyer that I personally spoke with (approximately five to ten) knew, prior to
conversing with me, of a
publications discussed above and that would deal with a proposal to ban
retainers. The methods used to notice the 2008 proposal to ban nonrefundable
were also clearly ineffective in giving
hearing.
The Manner In Which The
Approval of The 2009 Proposal To Ban Nonrefundable Retainers
In August of 2008, the Commission prior proposed approach
Rule I.S(t) was abandoned. This proposed rule consisted of one sentence.
In late 2009, the Commission totally redrafted Rule I.S and expanded it in a new
paragraph (e) and five accompanying
2008 proposal). The Commission , along with 34 other
rules to the Board of Governors for approval in November of2009, without informing the
5 For example , the notices of public California Bar Journal
merely noted that the Commission was considering
governed a wide variety of issues including "fees for legal services " while the notices of
public hearing published in the Los Angeles Daily Journal the Recorder and the
Sacramento Bee provided no information whatsoever about any of the proposed
changes. Assuming someone sorted through the public notices in these publications and
discovered the Commission s notice, all they would have
Sacramento meeting about "proposed amended attorney rules of professional conduct."
The emails sent out to theoretically interested parties similarly failed to mention anything
about nonrefundable retainers, either providing no details about any of the proposed rule
changes or listing a number of potential changes unrelated to nonrefundable retainers.
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