Report 2007-030 Recommendations

To ensure that the strategic plan is fully implemented in an effective and timely manner, the State Bar should complete revisions of the departmental plans that will serve to implement the board's strategic goals and ensure that each departmental plan contains meaningful performance indicators that will measure how successfully goals are being met.

To ensure that the strategic plan is fully implemented in an effective and timely manner, the State Bar should limit performance measurement to indicators that can be accurately tracked on an ongoing basis and measure desired outcomes.

To ensure that the strategic plan is fully implemented in an effective and timely manner, the State Bar should ensure that its departments, during their departmental plan-revision process, identify the objectives and performance measures that can be attained, considering existing resource levels and information technology capabilities.

On an ongoing basis the departments should revise their annual action plans to update this information given additional information technology upgrades.

To ensure that the strategic plan is fully implemented in an effective and timely manner, the State Bar should take the steps necessary to ensure its information technology systems can capture the required performance measurement data to support the projects needed to accomplish strategic-planning objectives, or devise alternative means of capturing this data such as using an Excel spreadsheet.

To ensure that it maximizes collection efforts and its ability to implement the Rules of Court as soon as the supreme court approves procedures allowing their use, the State Bar should complete its database and input all available information on the Client Security Fund and disciplinary debtors.

To ensure that it maximizes collection efforts and its ability to implement the Rules of Court as soon as the supreme court approves procedures allowing their use, the State Bar should implement its proposed policy for pursuing debtors.

To ensure that it maximizes collection efforts and its ability to implement the Rules of Court as soon as the supreme court approves procedures allowing their use, the State Bar should complete its assessment of the costs and benefits of reporting judgments to credit-reporting agencies.

To effectively allocate its resources and justify its membership fees, the State Bar should align its budgets with the results of its strategic-planning process.

To ensure that it receives all the trust account interest income available for its legal services program, the State Bar should consider conducting activities, such as interviewing or surveying a sample of members who do not report whether they have established trust accounts. This would allow the State Bar to determine whether some members are holding clients' funds without establishing trust accounts and remitting the interest to the State Bar. If the State Bar finds that the nonreporting members do, in fact, hold client funds that are nominal in amount or are held for a short period of time, it should seek the authority to enforce compliance reporting.

To properly monitor recipients of grants under its legal services program, the State Bar should ensure that it performs and documents all required monitoring reviews.

The State Bar should develop a plan to perform the fiscal on-site monitoring visits that were not performed while staying current with its ongoing monitoring requirements.

The State Bar should continue its efforts to reduce its backlog of disciplinary cases to reach its goal of having no more than 200 cases.

The State Bar should ensure that staff use checklists of significant tasks when processing case files and fully implement its 2005 policy directive for random audits of case files by supervising trial counsel.