And Just Wait Until They Get the Bill from the Five Justices
How many lawyers does it take to run a bar association? Five, provided they are Utah Supreme Court Justices.</br></br>In an unprecedented ruling, the Utah Supreme Court put the 5,000-member Utah State Bar in what amounts to a kind of receivership after finding the bar was mired in a growing budget deficit with no clear plan to extricate itself.</br></br>An audit found that in each of the past five fiscal years, the bar spent as much as 30% more money than it received in dues -- which have been increased by about 90% over the past four years.</br></br>Petitioned by angry lawyers, the state Supreme Court ordered the bar to cut its expenses by about 15%, and forever desist from deficit spending and short-term borrowing against dues revenue.</br></br>"It's about time," says Brian M. Barnard, a Salt Lake City lawyer who is something of a bar gadfly. Two years ago, Mr. Barnard filed suit against the bar in federal court, claiming his mandatory dues were being spent on "frivolous things that are nonessential to the practice of law."