Girardi, Eastman Loom in California Bar Critic’s Discipline Case

Disbarred plaintiffs’ lawyer Thomas Girardi and Trump lawyer John Eastman haven’t been referenced by name in a San Diego lawyer’s disciplinary hearing, but their impact on the California State Bar hangs over the proceedings.

Attorney Benjamin Laurence Pavone has said before that the state bar focuses on relatively minor ethics violations by attorneys practicing as sole practitioners or with small firms while ignoring large-scale misconduct, like that of the now-disbarred and indicted Girardi, citing as evidence his analysis of a sample of discipline cases in 2021.

Pavone is charged with failing to represent Myzsa Willis in her bid to remain her grandmother Teresa McClain’s trustee.

Eastman’s recommended disbarment in late March has shifted his view, Pavone told Bloomberg Law in an email, with the caveat that although Eastman is well known, he doesn’t seem to be part of a major law firm and Pavone isn’t “at an informational position to assess the matter with any sort of precision at present.”

“If we start to see discipline cases involving members of the big firms, or discipline cases filed directly against them under CPRC 5.1, then one might infer that something has changed,” Pavone wrote.

California State Bar Court Judge Yvette D. Roland, who is handling Pavone’s proceedings, recommended in March that Eastman be disbarred for acting with “reckless disregard for the truth” in comments and writings after Trump lost the 2020 US presidential election.

Pavone’s charging document said his work was unnecessary and left his client, Willis, worse off. He racked up more than $660,000 in legal bills on her behalf, allegedly without telling her she was on the hook for them. Pavone said in disciplinary proceedings on Tuesday that he didn’t need to alert Willis to the mounting bills because he didn’t need her to sign off on them.

Willis testified on Tuesday that initial conversations with Pavone led her to believe she “had no choice” but to enlist his services. Pavone, who is representing himself, repeatedly asked Willis whether she blamed him for the judge delaying proceedings, extending the clock for his legal bills.

“In my point of view, all of the legal professionals failed me, even the judge,” Willis said during the State Bar Court proceedings on Tuesday. “All of the legal professionals failed in this case and caused trauma to myself and my family.”

Small Violation Discipline

Pavone wrote that his late August 2023 notice of disciplinary charges contains 2,017 distinct ethical violations, which he calculated in part based on the number of sentences in the document. Roland in court filings called this interpretation “subjective and unreasonable.”

Pavone argued that the volume is emblematic of the State Bar’s alleged practice of selectively prosecuting solo practitioners and attorneys from smaller firms, “a scandal that potentially dwarfs Girardi,” whose high-powered contemporaries allegedly escape the regulatory body’s scrutiny.

He raised the same concerns about small-scale attorney discipline after he was charged in 2020 with failing to respect the court and its officers while litigating an employment appeal.

He was ultimately suspended, though not because of comments he made that called a female judicial officer’s ruling “succubustic.” Those comments were protected by the First Amendment, a state bar court judge said in her 2022 suspension recommendation.

While Pavone’s case was unfolding, accusations that the now-disbarred and indicted plaintiffs’ lawyer Girardi stole millions from clients surfaced—alongside a scandal over the state bar largely turning aside complaints about Girardi’s conduct.

Pavone accused the state bar in court filings of scrutinizing small attorneys to distract from alleged efforts by the bar to conceal larger-scale crimes committed by high-powered lawyers.

“The scope and magnitude of the Girardi scandal demands a plenary, thorough and public accounting of the State Bar’s charging machinery viewed in the specific context of the scandal to explain how a multiple mass murderer was not caught, all the while the Bar spent its time prosecuting thousands of ethical traffic tickets,” Pavone wrote in court filings in 2021, using the hyperbole to refer to Girardi.

The state bar’s Office of Chief Trial Counsel responded that Pavone’s attempts to bring concerns about Girardi into the hearing would result in a waste of time and resources and cloud the issues in his proceeding.

“Of course, there is no doubt that the question of whether the California attorney discipline system or the State Bar of California could be improved as a general matter is an important one,” the Office of Chief Trial Counsel said in 2021.

But “in the instant proceedings, neither respondent, the State Bar, nor this Court are in a position to properly evaluate or resolve such questions,” the office said.

The case is In the matter of Benjamin Laurence Pavone, Cal. State Bar, No. SBC-23-O-30854, 4/9/24.