California Ordered Its Lawyer-Discipline Office to Shrink. Its Cost Grew 49% Anyway.

The office that investigates California's roughly 200,000 licensed attorneys is not short on money.▸ The State Bar's Annual Discipline Report for fiscal year 2025 puts the cost of running the discipline system at $127,000,681 — up 49% from $84,977,144 five years earlier, and a new high for the sixth year running. What it is short on, by legislative design, is people. In 2024 the Legislature wrote into the Business and Professions Code that the State Bar "shall seek to achieve, through employee attrition only, a 15 percent vacancy rate by April 1, 2027" — nearly double the 8% vacancy rate the Office of Chief Trial Counsel (OCTC) was already running, according to the California State Auditor's February 2025 review. The same Legislature denied OCTC's request that year for 57 additional staff and a fee increase to pay for them.

Nothing about the discipline system's cost trend looks like restraint.▸ Table SR-15 of the Annual Discipline Report — the State Bar's own statutorily required accounting — shows the total cost rising every single year since fiscal 2020, through a pandemic, a leadership scandal, and now a legislated staffing squeeze.

Most of that money — $83.4 million of the $127.0 million, or 66 cents of every dollar — goes to the Office of Chief Trial Counsel itself, the unit that receives, investigates, and prosecutes misconduct complaints.▸ The rest is split across the State Bar Court, the regulatory offices that support it, and the general counsel's office. The nine functions the State Bar tracks in Table SR-15 sum exactly to the reported total.

OCTC is the State Bar's largest office — almost 300 employees in 2023, nearly half the agency's workforce, according to the State Auditor.▸ OCTC itself told the auditor it needed more: a 2024 workforce analysis backed a request for 57 additional FTE positions, funded by a $15.25 licensing-fee increase, to meet the case processing standards the office proposed in 2022. The Legislature said no to both the positions and the fee increase. It funded an expansion of OCTC's diversion program instead, and wrote the 15% vacancy target into law — achievable only through attrition, since the statute bars the State Bar from firing staff just to hit the number.

The math is not subtle.▸ A 300-person office running 8% vacant already has roughly 24 empty seats. Pushed to a 15% vacancy floor, it would carry around 45 — about 21 more chairs sitting empty than today, on an office that told its own Legislature it needed 57 more people, not fewer.

The State Bar proposed in 2022 that no more than 10% of pending cases should sit in backlog — defined as a case that has run past 150% of its processing-time standard.▸ The State Auditor's review found the opposite trend: backlog has grown every year it measured, more than doubling in two years.

By the State Bar's own newer count in the FY2025 Annual Discipline Report — a different metric, tracking closed cases that missed their processing goal rather than the auditor's open-case snapshot — 2,674 cases, 14% of everything OCTC closed that year, missed the goal, with complex cases missing it 32% of the time.▸ Cases filed in the State Bar Court now take an average of 757 days to resolve, continuing a six-year upward trend. Two different yardsticks, pointed the same direction, measured by two different institutions that don't report to each other.

Figures cover the Office of Chief Trial Counsel and the discipline system as defined and cost-allocated by the State Bar's own Table SR-15; they do not capture the State Bar's admissions, legal-education, or general-fund operations outside the discipline function.