CHAVEZ, Victor -- profile

Profile of

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge

VICTOR E. CHAVEZ

Metropolitan News-Enterprise

Feb. 12, 1996

By SCOTT SMITH, Staff Writer

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Victor E. Chavez has been gathering momentum.

He is reputed to be eying the position of assistant presiding judge.

"I can't say I'm not going to run," Chavez says.

He adds that he's received a lot of encouragement to run from colleagues.

The election is actually more significant than the race for the top administrative post because, by court tradition, the assistant presiding judge is commonly elected to a second one-year term without opposition, then elected without opposition to two one-year terms as presiding judge.

If he decides to run and is elected, Chavez would take the place of Assistant Presiding Judge Robert Parkin who will presumably replace Presiding Judge Gary Klausner on Jan. 1, 1997.

Currently, Chavez serves on no less than six court committees. In December, he was elected to the 22-member Executive Committee, the court's policymaking body.

Chavez chairs the Special Events and Legislation Committees, as well as serving on the Basic Jury Instructions, Grand and Jury Trial, and Security Committees.

To top it all off, on Jan. 27, he was recognized as Trial Judge of the Year for 1995 by the Consumer Attorneys Assn. of Los Angeles.

Attorney Deborah David, the association's president-elect presented Chavez with the award. She says, "He's tremendously committed to the civil justice system."

David also says Chavez understands that lawyers, judges and court personnel "are there to serve the litigants and not for any other purpose, and he communicates that in his courtroom."

During a time of "horrendous" budget constraints, David praises Chavez for being "actively involved in keeping the system running."

"Vic's right in there," she says.

Since his appointment by then-Gov. George Deukmejian in 1990, Chavez has come to be known as the mainstay of collegiality among members of the Superior Court bench.

There are 238 Superior Court judges, isolated in their courtrooms and split up at 20 branches around the county. Though they may talk to dozens of attorneys, plaintiffs, defendants, and court employees every day, it is unusual that they spend any time with each other.

Judge Robert Mallano, who served as the court's presiding judge in 199394, calls Chavez a "warm, engaging person" whose main contribution to the court has been setting up "gatherings of judges at his house."

"Our tasks make us alone," Mallano says, and Chavez has "filled a valuable need" in planning dinners where judges can "break bread together."

Promoting collegiality, Chavez says, has been one of his goals because "there are just some nuggets out there that we haven't tapped." The court has no way of utilizing its members' unknown and surprising abilities because members don't all know each other, he says.

A network of colleagues can help judges solve complex problems, but for such a interchange to function, Chavez says, "you have to know who your colleagues are and what their strengths are."

He adds:

"If you don't know who's sitting in Santa Monica, if you never meet the people in Torrance, if you've got no notion of who's in Pomona, then you really don't know what resources are there."

Judges come to work early, leave late, and "never see our colleagues, or maybe see a few for lunch," Chavez bemoans, saying that's "a sad, sad thing."

As chair of the new special events committee, Chavez has organized events that will bring judges together, such as a day at the races, going to a baseball game, retirement dinners, and the annual dinner.

In his legal career, Chavez held various powerful positions.

From 1979 to 1986, he was one of 12 lawyers serving on the American Bar Assn.'s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary, which reviews candidates for the federal bench. He was also the first Latino on the committee.

Each member covers a federal appellate circuit. Chavez was responsible for California and Arizona portions of the Ninth U.S. Circuit, a position once held by attorney Warren Christopher, now secretary of state. The assignment gave Chavez the opportunity to write a report on U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

O'Connor was "extremely able" and "very, very well-qualified," Chavez says. "Had she been a male, she would have been at a higher level in the court system at that time," he adds.

Chavez calls the committee "a stepping stone" for those with ambitions to the presidency of the ABA. The man who followed Chavez, Sam Williams, the first black president of California Bar Assn., "was being groomed to be the first black president of the ABA." Williams, however, suffered a major stroke in 1987. He died in 1994 at the age of 61.

Chavez says the "unique" relationship of the ABA to the government involves investigating people the executive branch has already determined it wants. "No one gives you any money or time, and you don't have any staff," he says, "You just pick up the phone and start talking to people."

Chavez says the "beauty" of such investigations is that they are not subject to any subpoena power. In other words, what he learned about candidates could never be made public, unlike information gathered by the Federal Bureau of Investigations.

"So people were very hesitant to say something to the FBI...," Chavez recalls, "where they were not so hesitant to say so to us because they knew no one was going to hear what they had to say."

Chavez says he and the committee sometimes uncovered information that was "enough of a stumbling block" that candidates would ask that their nominations be withdrawn before "this little skeleton in their closet" caused the humiliation of being publicly declined.

Chavez was also the first Latino appointed to the State Bar's Committee of Bar Examiners. He served from 1971-75. He says the panel solicited bar exam questions from law school professors and then "worked them over... [to] see if they were skewed," and hence unfair.

"It was a great honor to be appointed," Chavez recalls, because it was at that time that the committee "had finally broken through" a tradition of being all white and all male. Sam Williams was the first black member. Elva Soper, now a Los Angeles Municipal Court Judge, was the first woman.

Chavez served on both committees while carrying a "very active practice" at Pomerantz & Chavez, his former partner Leonard Pomerantz says.

"He can't sit still," Pomerantz says, adding, "He's got to fill every minute of the day."

Chavez and Pomerantz met on opposite sides of a case. They happened to be on the same plane, flying to Lake Tahoe to take a deposition in an auto accident case. At the time, Chavez was with Early, Maslach, Foran & Williams handling medical malpractice cases for Farmers Insurance Group.

Pomerantz recalls that Chavez was "their head trial man" and handled "an incredible number of cases." He joined Pomerantz in 1969, trying mostly personal injury cases. Chavez never turned a client away, taking on many cases pro bono, according to his former partner.

Chavez was "an incredibly skilled trial attorney" because of his "wonderful rapport with people" Pomerantz says. And that ability has carried over into his work as a judge.

"Juries love him," Pomerantz says, because he "talks to rather than at them."

Pomerantz also claims that Chavez is "one of the hardest working judges," that his reporter complains of the judge's habit of getting a new trial underway while juries are still deliberating on other cases, and that his wife once complained that he demanded to be released early after surgery so that he could be in court by 8 a.m.

Chavez works in the Superior Court's "fast track" system, handling cases projected to last under five weeks and working to reduce the time of the cases he does take.

"This system works beautifully," Chavez says. He says he had about 1,200 files when he first joined the fast track system, but has pared that down to about 370.

Chavez says cases are moved along by seeing the lawyers "constantly." He says most cases "are in and out of here in less than a year," recalling that when he was an attorney, it could take as many as five years to get to trial.

He stops trial proceedings at 4 p.m. everyday, and spends the rest of the evening meeting with lawyers in settlement conferences. "If you don't settle it," Chavez says, "you at least get [lawyers] them thinking in terms of settling."

There are 50 "direct calendar" courtrooms taking part in the Superior Court's fast track system, Chavez says. "The backlog has been reduced," he claims. "It's not there, it's nonexistent."

Fast track works downtown because Chavez and other participating judges have help. "I have half of a law clerk and a full calendar clerk," he says. His colleagues at the branch courts do not have the help.

Consequently, there is still a three or four year wait to go to trial in the branch courts, Chavez says. "There isn't the money to give them the help they need and the computers they need to do what we're doing," he says.

The financial crisis of Los Angeles County has made the Superior Court "probably the most efficient court that's ever existed," Chavez asserts. He has previously served on the court's budget committee.

"We have pared and pared and pared," he says, "but we have now pared to the point where we're getting to nerves."

He says is mindful of the situation the County Board of Supervisors face, but "if every citizen has a right to a trial..., we've got to have the funds to run it."

Chavez has long been a member of the Mexican American Bar Assn. "It's an organization dear to my heart," he says. He recalls joining in 1961 at a time when the group only had about two dozen members.

Chavez recalls that one of the issues MABA dealt with at the time was "judges who were not particularly down-the-middle." He said some judges had a "very definite agenda that did not appear to be fair to all sides."

MABA would call such judges to the attention of the "people who were above the judges," he says. "We really were successful, with subtle pressure, in improving the lot of our peers."

MABA has grown as a result. When Chavez was elected president in 1971, there were about 300 members. Today, 1,200 attorneys are members.

When he was still an attorney, Chavez got to work with his daughter, Victoria Chavez. She graduated from her father's alma mater, Loyola Law School, then came to work with him.

"She gave me the chance to get to know a child as a colleague and friend," he says.

Chavez gets teary-eyed, recalling their time together as "the best nine years of my practice." He says his daughter is "a good lawyer, far better than her father."

If people make the mistake of assuming that a daughter is taking after her father, Victoria Chavez, 42, is quick to correct them: "I think it's the other way around."

Chavez is the only judge in Los Angeles County to have been sworn in by his daughter, who became a Municipal Court judge in 1988. And, two years later, in January, 1993, he returned the favor by swearing her in following her elevation to the Superior Court.

"It certainly makes a child proud," Victoria Chavez says, "to see a parent follow in your footsteps."

Indeed, Chavez credits his daughter for giving him the idea of becoming a judge. His wife told him, "Look at Victoria, she's happy as a lark" on the bench and reminded him that he was still taking depositions, still tired and still working weekends.

Chavez says both his partner Pomerantz and then-Presiding Judge Richard "Skip" Byrne encouraged him to submit an application.

Comparing his careers, Chavez says he prefers a judge's need to be a generalist to a lawyer's tendency to specialize. "I liken it to a pie," he says. As a lawyer he only did "a little sliver of the pie," but now he does "everything from unlawful detainer to architectural malpractice."

Though Chavez mostly hears civil matters, the case overload created by the Three Strikes law means that he must also take on an "overlay" of criminal cases. Last year, he presided over about 20 trials.

Chavez says he loves the "eclectic" mix of cases. When people ask him why he doesn't "try for the appellate court," he says he would "never, ever" leave his current seat. "I love this court," he says.

"I'm a people person," he explains, adding:

"I like trials. I like lawyers. I like seeing them. I don't want to read about them. I don't want to read what they've written as much as I want to see and hear what they're doing."

Chavez says he was born within four miles of the Central Courthouse "in the shadow of the Queen of Angels Hospital." His parents were to poor to go to the hospital, so he was born at home.

His father was a boilermaker for the Santa Fe Railroad. His mother was in the first University of California class to graduate at UCLA's Westwood campus, and since she was pregnant with him at matriculation, Chavez jokes that he also has a degree from UCLA. After getting a master's degree from University of Southern California, his mother taught in the Los Angeles schools.

Both Chavez's sisters were also teachers, and his aunts, uncles and cousins were also teachers. "I was the black sheep of the family," he says because he didn't become a teacher.

Chavez attended Mt. Carmel High School. Mallano, who also attended Mt. Carmel, jokes that he and Chavez came from "the wrong side of the tracks," since rival Loyola High School is the alma mater of most of those in the "power structure" of the Superior Court.

After graduating from Loyal University of Los Angeles (now Loyola Marymount) in 1953, Chavez served as an U.S. Air Force intelligence officer with a fighter squadron in Tucson, Ariz.

"I loved it," he recalls. "It was sort of like being a Walter Cronkite....I would give briefings every morning to the pilots on what was happening in the world."

He took a law school entrance exam on a whim, was successful, and so began his career. While in law school, he was president of the Student Bar Assn. But he says that by the time he graduated he had still never been in a courtroom, nor did he know any lawyers.

His first job, representing Farmer's Insurance Group in medical malpractice cases, came about because Chavez had been a Farmer's scholarship recipient. "The beauty of working for an insurance company," he says, "was that they never questioned what you needed to defend these physicians and hospitals."

Chavez joined Pomerantz because he wanted to be able to pay for the education of his six children. "We were a perfect combination," he says, because Pomerantz was an "academic, able" lawyer while his own "skills--if I have any skills--are in the area of jury trials."

Chavez's trial experience led to his recognition as a "diplomat" of the American Board of Trial Advocates for having tried at least 100 civil jury trials to conclusion in a superior or federal court.

He was president of the local ABOTA chapter in 1979, and has been on the executive committee ever since.

Although Chavez has certainly had many prestigious posts, people more often remember him as a co-founder (with attorney James Nichols of Bonne, Bridges, Mueller, O'Keefe & Nichols) of the Cowboy Lawyers Assn.

Chavez says of members:

"We are people who put on a typical cowboy hat, and sometimes some chaps, and certainly always spurs. And we get out on the trail and we ride....There's nothing like riding on the trail with someone to get to know them.''

A profile on Judge Chavez appeared in the Dec. 31 "Person of the Year" issue of the Metropolitan News-Enterprise. To read that profile,

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Photos of the Cowboy-Style Chavez Wedding

Victor Chavez--Thumbnail Sketch, Links

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