Jonathan Ames asks whether California's process holds any lessons for lawyers at home

When Law Society senior officers and officials arrived in San Francisco for this year's American Bar Association annual conference in August, they made a bee-line for James Herman.

Mr Herman is the president of the board of governors of the State Bar of California; he is also something of an expert on complaints handling and disciplinary matters.

California is the only state in the US with a unified legal profession governing body that performs both representative and regulatory functions.

There are some 150,000 practising lawyers in California, and indeed, the structure and situation of the California Bar is almost a mirror image of the Law Society's role and position in England and Wales.

Strikingly similar, too, is the California bar's experience with complaints handling, which is why Mr Harman attracted so much attention from the Chancery Lane hierarchy, undoubtedly with recent words of the Legal Services Ombudsman (LSO) and the Lord Chancellor ringing in their ears.

Their interest was well justified, as subsequently Lord Falconer has increased the LSO's job description to encompass the new role of Legal Services Complaints Commissioner.

Although the California bar has been carrying out its dual role for the past 75 years, it was only 15 years ago that it formed a fully professional complaints and disciplinary unit.

Previously, disciplinary matters had been dealt with by a voluntary group of lawyers.

But in the mid-1980s a San Francisco newspaper campaign alleged that - as Mr Harman puts it - 'the foxes were guarding the hen house, and that the system was corrupt with cronyism'.

The argument was that there were favoured people who were never pursued, and that there were people that the local bar didn't like who were consistently pursued.

And there was a substantial backlog of cases, as they were not being efficiently processed.

Therefore, under pressure from the media, the state legislature rebuilt the system from the bottom up, creating a fully professional complaints and disciplinary structure, which is the only such body for lawyers in the US.

All of the prosecutors and bar investigators are professionals; the bar has six trial courts and three review courts spread over the state.

With an annual budget of about $45 million - financed by a practising certificate fee of $380 - the curiously named intake unit has about 25 investigators.

It deals with about 125,000 enquiries from the public every year, of which between 3,000 to 4,000 get to the stage of a formal complaint.

Just as the Westminster government has a keen eye trained on the performance of the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors, so too have the legislators in the California capital of Sacramento been peering at the activities of the intake unit.

'We are always under the microscope of the legislature and we are always blowing in the political winds,' explains Mr Herman.

He points to a conflict that reached a crisis point six years ago.

The then Republican governor, Pete Wilson (himself a lawyer) took the view that the bar was arrogant and bloated, and therefore vetoed the annual authorisation required for the bar to impose a practising certificate fee.

Two years later the state supreme court overruled the move, but the damage had been done.

The complaints and disciplinary functions had effectively been destroyed and had to be rebuilt.

So, is self-regulation the best model? Mr Harman gives a qualified response: 'If we were to start over, it probably makes sense to have a system separate from member services, because the current position creates a schizophrenic role.

We can't look only at what is best for lawyers - we have to protect the public and help our members.

So the dual role is not ideal.

'However, given that we have spent a good period working on this model - so that the foxes aren't guarding the hen house - it really does work as an independent regulatory body with a membership services aspect as well.'

Chancery Lane officials will find out soon enough whether the new secretary of state for constitutional affairs takes the same view.