A recent The Recorder story, “Embarrassed Panel Rethinks Ruling on Fee Arbitration” reports that an appeals court in California seemed ready to undo a published opinion (pdf) that said a volunteer fee arbitrator should have disclosed that he regularly represents law firms in fee disputes.  At the root of the problem, Justice J. Anthony Kline said, was that parties in the fee dispute engaged in a binding arbitration – but they do so under the State Bar of California’s Mandatory Fee Arbitration (MFA) Program, which is nonbinding.

Everything flowed from that blunder, Kline said, including the initial opinion he wrote for the court, Benjamin Weill & Mazer v. Kors.  In it, the court sided with a woman fighting her former law firm over unpaid attorney fees, finding that the chief fee arbitrator in the case, Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin partner Sean SeLegue, should have disclosed that he regularly represents law firms in fee disputes cases. 

That ruling troubled leaders of the MFA program, who noted in a de-publication request letter (pdf), signed by several former chairs of the State Bar Committee on Mandatory Fee Arbitration, that under the rules of the Bar Association of San Francisco mandatory fee arbitration program, SeLegue did not have the same disclosure requirements a private neutral would.  The letter went on to predict that the onerous disclosure requirements the Kors case would impose would cause the fee arbitration system to “collapse.”

See also blog post “CA Appeals Court: Disclose Clientele to Arbitrate Attorney Fee Disputes”