Optimistic is a word I don’t often use when it comes to the machinations of the State Bar of California. But the recent appointment of the second rules revision commission has me feeling positively optimistic. Well, cautiously optimistic.
As I wrote in this space last October, after years of fits and starts, and with far more fits than starts, the State Bar Commission for the Revision of the Rules of Professional Conduct, the first commission whose task was a soup-to-nuts revision of California’s ethics rules, was disbanded by order of the Supreme Court with essentially none of its work product being adopted despite over a decade of work. The court ordered a new rules commission be created by the bar with input from the court, and on Jan. 30 the members of that rules commission were announced.
