Kurt Bulmer
By Stefani Quane
October marks Kurt Bulmer’s 30th year in practice. For three decades Bulmer has worked in the area of attorney discipline, both for the Washington State Bar Association and as counsel for accused lawyers. Joy McLean, the cur-rent Chief Disciplinary Counsel for the Bar, says Kurt Bulmer is one of the most knowledgeable attorneys in the state about lawyer discipline and has had a large impact on Washington’s disciplinary system. At the national level, he’s helped write the ABA standards on attorney discipline.
The Seeds of His Career
I asked Kurt if the seeds for his career were present from an early age. He graduated from high school in the 60’s at a time when awareness about individual rights was blooming.
Growing up, he was fascinated by the concept of individual rights vs. the government. Now, he says, “I help people who are charged by the government make the government do its job and prove its case.”
Born in New York, raised in Wenatchee, Kurt was drawn to debate and oral argument in high school. He can’t remember his college major at the University of Washington. “B.A. in English Literature--or something like that,” he says. Despite his interests in debate and individual rights, he didn’t arrive at the decision to go to law school until his senior year of college. He made the choice pragmatically. “I sat down and reflected on what I enjoyed doing and what I was good at. I ruled out engineering and accounting, and decided the law was a natural fit.”
After a year of National Guard duty, he attended Willamette College of Law. He loved law school. “I understood it. I enjoyed the Socratic Method. I realized that the law was finite and that if you studied all the pertinent cases and laws, you could respond to the professor’s question and be right.”
1974 was a significant year for Kurt. He graduated from law school, got married, and started his first job. He is still married to Miriam Bulmer. They have two children; daughter Emily Bulmer, a middle school counselor who graduated from Mount Holvoak College; and son Nathan Bulmer who studies art in Kansas City.
Into the Fire
Out of law school in 1974 Kurt Bulmer went to work for the Washington State Bar as staff investigator and assistant to the General Counsel, Doug Baldwin. At that time there were only two paid attorneys representing the Bar as WSBA moved from a voluntary system of attorney self-policing to a less voluntary system. According to Bulmer, Watergate brought the county’s attention to the issue of attorney discipline and Washington committed to having a paid staff responsible for attorney monitoring. Washington was adding a thousand lawyers a year and exhausting the volunteers’ capacity to adequately police the practice.
Kurt was the first full time staff attorney devoted to attorney discipline for the bar. He was given the responsibility of bringing attorney discipline actions. “I was just a kid. It was sink or swim. Within the first few years of practice, I was arguing my first State Supreme Court case.” At the beginning, there was such a backlog of attorney discipline cases that they practiced triage. “We only had time to handle the slam dunk cases, the ones were we knew the lawyers were stealing,” says Bulmer.
Within two to three years, Bulmer became General Counsel and his job shifted to include managerial functions. He hired attorneys and staff. He studied other agencies for insight into how to run a successful agency. His new duties also included representing the Bar on non-disciplinary matters, defending bar exam challenges, and drafting ethics rules.
He left the Bar in 1981. With a change in administration, he felt it was a good time to leave. As he was leaving he became more active at the national level, assisting the ABA with attorney disciplinary issues. Kurt knew he wanted to continue working in the attorney discipline field, but he wasn’t able to go immediately into a private practice because most of the active disciplinary cases were ones filed under his watch as the Bar’s General Counsel. Instead, he worked for a book publishing company which allowed him to build a solo practice on the side. He says his practice quickly grew by word of mouth, without marketing. By mid-1982, he was able to go out on this own. He’s been a solo practitioner ever since. His current office is on Capitol Hill--a casual location that matches his casual style.
Reflecting on his career, he estimates he’s represented 2,500 to 3,000 attorneys. Given the nature of his work, his attorney clients often will not acknowledge that they know him in public. At meetings, he often sees clients but does not approach them. “I’ve been introduced to clients I’ve seen just that week in my office. We shake hands and act as if we’ve just met.”
I was curious about his client list. “You’d be surprised by the names on my client list, but not every case involves something bad.” He breaks his case load into three types of cases. The first type is the problem case where someone has complained about the lawyer doing something bad.
The second type is a conflict case. These lawyers don’t know how the conflict rules will apply to them and they want a legal opinion. Say for example, a lawyer is a year into a case and the client has incurred thousands of dollars in fees. Only then does opposing counsel raise the conflict. Bulmer discusses the pros and cons of the case to help the lawyer decide what to do.
The third type is the case where the client “knows they can’t do something, but they need to hear me say no.” Perhaps it involves taking a case where there is a lot of money involved. Maybe the lawyer is smitten wants to a date the client. “These attorneys are good people, but don’t want to let the case go.” After giving his advice, he typically hears, “I knew that was the answer.”
Do Lawyers Have Bad Character?
I asked Mr. Bulmer if he’s found that lawyers are dishonest as a group. “No. We’re overwhelmingly good people. Relatively few of the lawyers are amoral.” He compares the Washington Bar to a town of equal size, 30,000 adults. In the course of a year in a small town, you’d expect a few felonies, and more misdemeanors. In a typical year, the Bar might file 80 to 100 disciplinary matters. Of these, there might only be five to seven disbarments. According to Bulmer, the system is working. We do not have many dishonest attorneys operating without the Bar’s intervention.
Bulmer says the public’s perception that the Bar doesn’t do anything about bad attorneys is wrong. Some lawyers grumble that they have turned a lawyer in but that the Bar has done nothing about the matter. Sometimes the Bar lacks sufficient proof to prevail against an attorney. That’s Bulmer’s job-- to see that the Bar proves its case. The attorney is entitled to due process. To inflict sanctions, the Bar needs more than rumors that a lawyer has acted dishonestly.
According to Bulmer, the worst cases are those where a lawyer has a mental health problem that gets worse over time. People will gossip about the attorney for years, but no one reports the attorney. The Bar doesn’t learn of the attorney until there is a disaster, such as an explosion of 40 cases arising suddenly after a flair up in the attorney’s mental health disorder.
How to Avoid Getting Caught in the Disciplinary Web
According to Bulmer, the easiest way to avoid a disciplinary action is to keep your clients happy. Half of the grievances are filed by clients. The other half are filed by judges, lawyers, opposing clients and others. You have control over your clients. “Clients are amazingly resilient. They will understand if you are honest with them about making a mistake in their case.” Lawyers start on the path to trouble by telling the first little lie, says Bulmer. For example, they might fudge and say that they filed a petition when in fact they were too busy to file it. They intend to file it immediately, but then time gets away. They blow the statute of limitations. Next, a lawyer might fake a settlement and pay the client himself. The client only learns about the fake lawsuit after speaking with a neighbor. The neighbor says I was never in a lawsuit with you.
According to Bulmer, typical lawyers are good for most of their careers. Bad lawyering occurs when other life circumstances get out of control: such as when lawyers have money problems, start drinking, or suffer a family crisis. These tough times weaken a lawyer and this is when lawyers make a bad choice to shred evidence, dip into the trust account, or cuss out a judge. When counseling these stressed clients, Bulmer tries to help them identify the larger problems in their lives so that their inappropriate work behavior will not happen again.
According to Bulmer, another reason lawyers get into disciplinary problems is that the attorney ethics rules address regulatory functions as well as moral competency. The two should be separate functions, he says. If you violate a regulatory rule--say a rule about placing your name and phone number on an advertisement--you are charged as if you’ve acted amorally, says Bulmer. We should have different solutions for regulatory violations.
He analogizes this to the criminal code verses the administrative code. “Crooks should be out. But we shouldn’t ruin someone’s reputation and livelihood just because they blundered on some administrative detail. Stealing from a client is a question of moral character; understanding how to operate an IOLTA account as a new attorney might not be.”
Bulmer is supportive of a new WSBA program called “diversion” where lawyers get specialized help on an identified problem and, after a time of no further problems, their disciplinary matter is dismissed. It’s hard to get into, says Bulmer. Everyone wants it. The Bar is also reevaluating the ethics rules, which is also a good thing, says Bulmer.
Career Recommendations
I asked Kurt if he believed lawyer discipline would be a good niche for other lawyers. He says his work suits the person who can “rationalize victory.” By this he means someone who feels satisfied helping someone achieve a reduced disciplinary sentence. “If a person must Ôwin’ outright, they aren’t going to be happy representing accused attorneys. If the Bar is doing its job, they shouldn’t lose more than 10% of their case, otherwise their evaluation process is broken.” Kurt feels good if he can help someone reduce a disbarment charge down to a six-month suspension.
According to Joy McLean at the Bar, Kurt has been reducing sanctions for an entire career, and yet he has always done so with integrity, and without stooping to the behavior some of his clients have been charged with.
With 30 years of service into the profession, he’s a model of an ethical
lawyer.
Stefani Quane--the Lawlady--is a family practice and collaborative lawyer who can be found at (206) 932-9699 and Stefani@lawlady.com. Kurt Bulmer will be co-chairing KCBA’s full day ethics program on December 3, 2004.
