JoAnne Robbins, Attorney At Law

JoAnne Earls Robbins, Esq.
Karpman & Associates
9777 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 1000
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
(310) 887-3900
JoAnne@karpman.com

Ms. Robbins was admitted to practice in California in 1978. She has been involved with legal ethics and the attorney disciplinary system at the State Bar of California for more< than twenty-six (26) years. From early 1982 through 1988, she was a deputy trial counsel (prosecutor) for the Office of Trial Counsel, State Bar of California, including serving as a supervising attorney and acting as Assistant Chief Trial Counsel. She also served as Chief Assistant Court Counsel for the State Bar Court in Los Angeles, and staff counsel to the Client Security Fund Commission.

In 1989, she was appointed by the Supreme Court of California as a Hearing Judge of the State Bar Court, one of the first nine State Bar judges ever appointed in California. She served as a Hearing Judge for the State Bar Court for more than six years, handling more than one thousand cases. She gave numerous seminars and served on many panels for California attorneys on the subject of legal ethics and the attorney discipline system.

For more than eleven years, Ms. Robbins has been in private practice limited to legal ethics and State Bar discipline and regulation cases. She has been designated as an expert witness in legal ethics and fiduciary duties in civil cases. She has given frequent seminars on legal ethics, the Rules of Professional Conduct, and State Bar discipline law and procedures.

Ms. Robbins has updated and revised chapters on legal ethics, conflict of interest, and attorney discipline for Matthew Bender's Pleading and Practice. She also taught Legal Ethics as an adjunct law professor, from 1997 to 2001, at Golden Gate Law School.

She is a member of the Los Angeles County Bar Association's Ethics Committee. She is a founding member and former co-president of the Attorneys Discipline Defense Counsel, the statewide organization for attorneys representing attorneys before the State Bar.

Ms. Robbins was a member of the State Bar Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct from 2002 to 2005. She was a member of the Special Sub-Committee on Rules of Procedure, chaired by Justice Elwood Lui, who was appointed by the Supreme Court as Special Master of the State Bar Discipline System, during 1999 and 2000. During that time, she was also a member of the Board of Governors Future Planning Committee. She has also served on the State Bar Board of Governors' Alternative Discipline Advisory Committee.

From 2000 to 2002, Ms. Robbins wrote a monthly column on legal ethics for the Los Angeles Daily Journal legal newspaper.