The Trial Lawyers College was once an illustrious litigation training school for lawyers. Today, the 25-year-old embattled institution is on the verge of receivership thanks to disputes among board members, including its founder 91-year-old Gerry Spence, a Montecito attorney who has not lost a jury trial since 1969 and has never failed at a criminal case.
“Disagreements started with a certain group of the board that wanted to do things differently than what Gerry Spence and his group of board members had been doing,” said Rex Parris, an attorney who attended the school 25 years ago. “It’s like a divorce: There is never one reason parties break up. There are lots of reasons and then when the separation occurs, you start discovering issues you didn’t know about.”
One of those issues is $6 million.
“The law requires board approval to transfer money from one bank to another because the Trial Lawyers College is a charitable nonprofit corporation,” Parris told the Southern California Record. “We find out that without board approval, the treasurer and the president transferred the money to where he banks without the required disclosure.”
The Trial Lawyer’s College was founded by Spence in 1994 to teach lawyers who represent people, not the government or corporations, in personal injury, product liability and criminal cases how to win litigation.
“Part of the rules are you cannot attend the college if you represent corporations or the government,” said Parris. “You have to represent people and that's become a big issue. It turns out that the treasurer is a corporate defense attorney. They are ignoring the by-laws and the mission statements.”
The last straw for Parris and three other board members who want to uphold Spence’s vision for the school is discovering reports in which endowment funds are missing.
“There were no endowment funds declared and that's just wrong,” Parris said. “We’ve collected millions of dollars for the endowment. When we requested an audit, the rest of the board asked for our resignation from the board.”
Currently, there’s a lawsuit pending in Cheyenne, Wyoming Superior Court between the warring board of directors over who should be on the board.
“The law requires a two-thirds vote to remove somebody from the board of directors so what they did is lower the minimum number of directors and then re-elected themselves as directors and did not vote us in, which is illegal,” said Parris who is among the board members who was ousted. “How you replace a director is the director can resign or you vote somebody in to take his seat. Again, they ignored the rules.”
Some 3,000 trial lawyers have undergone the intensive 3-week training, according to the Trial Lawyers College website, and Parris foresees the school shuttering if the dispute is not resolved.
“Eleven African American students complained of racial slurs being used in the classroom by one presenter in particular," said Parris.
"I wanted to reprimand and sanction the presenter but the board voted it down. If we don't fix these issues, there will be no Trial Lawyers College and younger lawyers are not going to have the benefit of learning Gerry Spence's successful method. It takes a long time to become a competent trial lawyer but at the Trial Lawyer’s College, we're able to speed that process up.”