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Not all attorneys are happy with the mandatory dues they pay to the Wisconsin State Bar – or how the organization uses them.

Since the Bar’s founding in the 1950s, membership and dues-paying have been required of any attorney practicing law in the state, as mandated by State Supreme Court rules.

Those rules also provide an arbitration process for lawyers to dispute and potentially win rebates as to how the Bar uses their dues – generally, it can only be for “regulating the legal profession or improving the quality of legal services.”

But earlier this week, the Supreme Court brushed off an attempt led by a Madison attorney, Steve Levine, to hold the Bar to a stricter standard of proof in cases where lawyers challenge how the organization is spending their money, reports the Wisconsin Law Journal.

Levine, a past president of the Bar, says it should be required to present “clear and convincing evidence” demonstrating its spending is furthering one of the two goals described in Supreme Court rules.

Justices voted 5-2 to table Levine’s petition to impose the tougher standard. Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson noted that, at some future time, she’d like to see the court clarify “the rule that the burden is on the State Bar.”

Levine and other attorneys recently lost a case before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (a federal appeals court) in which they argued the Bar shouldn’t have spent dues on a PR campaign that included TV ads depicting lawyers as beneficial, contributing members of the community. The court ruled the ads improved “the quality of legal services available to the Wisconsin public.”

The campaign cost about $5 per Bar member, the Journal calculates.

Last year, the Bar’s Board of Governors nearly voted to ask the Supreme Court to consider making membership in the organization voluntary, as reported in NewsBuzz. Some members protest paying $224 a year to the Bar; others disagree with the positions it lobbies for in the state Legislature.

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