Metropolitan News-Enterprise

 

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

 

Page 1

 

Commissioner Reichman to Retire After 30 Years of Service

 

By KENNETH OFGANG, Staff Writer

 

Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner Victor Reichman, a bench officer for 33 years, is retiring.

Yesterday was Reichman’s last day on the bench, and he will officially retire at the end of the month.

“I’ve done my share,” he told the MetNews yesterday. “It’s time to let somebody else step in and take over.”

Reichman, 63, was 30 years old, with barely five years’ legal experience, when he became a juvenile court referee in 1975. He was the county’s youngest judicial officer at the time and perhaps the youngest ever.

He became a commissioner in 1977, before the present requirement of 10 years’ State Bar membership was instituted.

Reichman currently sits at the Michael D. Antonovich Antelope Valley Courthouse, where he has a general civil assignment that includes most of the courthouse’s mandatory settlement conferences. He opened the area’s juvenile court in 1976 and heard its entire docket for several years while also hearing civil, criminal, and family law cases.

He has worked in the area for most of his career, although he traveled the county at the beginning of his tenure and has also had assignments in Sylmar, Newhall and downtown Los Angeles. He ran for the Antelope Municipal Court in 1994 and was rated “well qualified” by the County Bar, but lost a runoff to a local prosecutor, Pamela Rogers, who subsequently became a Superior Court  judge through unification before taking disability retirement.

While ruling out a return to private practice—he handled civil, criminal, juvenile, and labor law cases as a sole practitioner in Norwalk before becoming a full-time commissioner—he said his future plans are otherwise “kind of up in the air” until “after March Madness.”

A die-hard sports fan who was once a regular on the trading card show circuit, he noted that three schools he attended—Drake University, which he went to for a year; UCLA, where he earned his undergraduate degree; and USC, where he went to law school—are all competing for the NCAA basketball championship. He said he intends to watch as many of the tournament’s 63 games as he can on television, after which he may go into private judging.

He said he will miss the “beautiful” courthouse where he has worked since it opened in 2003, as well as the other judicial officers. His colleagues have been “really nice,” he said, and he was effusive in his praise of Supervising Judge Thomas White.

 

Copyright 2008, Metropolitan News Company