A judge tentative ruled Tuesday that a lawsuit by a former State Bar executive, who alleges he was fired for exposing ethical breaches within the agency responsible for the oversight of the state’s attorneys, should be sent to an arbitrator.
However, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mitchell Beckloff took the case under submission and said he’d have a final ruling by Friday on the State Bar’s motion to order arbitration of Joseph Dunn’s lawsuit.
“I just want to be able to go through what you’ve argued,” Beckloff said.
Dunn’s attorney, Mark Geragos, said he was pleased Beckloff wants to examine the issues further.
“Any time you have a tentative ruling go against you and then the judge takes the case under submission, I’m cautiously optimistic,” Geragos told City News Service.
Geragos said the case is one that should be before a judge and not an arbitrator.
“I can’t think of a case more deserving from a public policy standpoint of staying before your honor so that the attorneys in this state can see what’s going on in the State Bar,” he said.
Dunn filed the case last November, naming as defendants the State Bar and Craig Holden, who was installed as its president last September.
The State Bar attorneys maintain that Dunn was bound by his employment agreement to arbitrate disputes if informal negotiations and mediation fail.
State Bar attorney Ronald Frank said that because efforts to resolve the case last month in settlement negotiations with Judge William MacLaughlin failed, the time is now for the case to be sent to arbitration.
Frank said Geragos’ public policy argument for keeping the case in the courts is flawed.
“Many issues of public concern are subject to the arbitration process and this is one of them,” Frank said.
If Beckloff sends the case to arbitration, he will have to decide what to do with the portion of the complaint against Beth Jay, the former principal counsel to the chief justice of the state Supreme Court. She was recently added as a defendant in Dunn’s lawsuit.
The complaint now alleges that Jay intentionally interfered with Dunn’s employment agreement. She met with members of the State Bar Board of Trustees and the organization’s staff to urge his firing and to disseminate “blatantly false information” about the plaintiff, even though she has no authority over the business affairs of the State Bar, the suit alleges.
Beckloff could send the part of the case against Jay to arbitration as well, or have it separately litigated in court.
Dunn was named the State Bar’s executive director in September 2010 and was given a second three-year term in 2013 before being fired last November, according to his complaint.
Dunn, a former state senator from Orange County, contends that he ruffled feathers when he reported that under State Bar Chief Trial Counsel Jayne Kim’s direction, internal reports were altered to remove cases from the statutory backlog.
Kim’s alleged misconduct was not isolated, but instead “shockingly rampant,” according to Dunn’s court papers.
After Kim found out about Dunn’s concerns regarding her performance, she filed a complaint against him in an attempt to preserve her position, his suit alleges.
—City News Service