Tuesday, November 12, 2002
Page 7
PERSONALITY PROFILE—
James Heiting, State Bar Board of Governors
16 Years After Addressing His Alcoholism, Riverside Attorney Takes Seat on State Bar Board of Governors
By J'AMY PACHECO, Staff Writer
The Riverside office from which James Heiting practices law looks like something out of the Old South.
The white-columned building is surrounded by 70-year-old magnolia and jacaranda trees, visible from Heiting’s desk. It’s a peaceful, serene environment, and Heiting would be happy there alone — if the firm he heads with his partner, Richard Irwin, ever dwindled to a solo practice.
But Heiting, 53, isn’t likely to find a lot of time to gaze at the trees in the near future. He was sworn in last month as the District Six representative to the State Bar Board of Governors during the organization’s annual meeting in Monterey.
As District Six governor, Heiting represents lawyers in a far-flung district that encompasses San Bernardino and Riverside Counties in the Inland Empire, as well as the coastal counties of San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, and Ventura. He succeeds James Herman, current president of the State Bar.
Heiting’s resume is lengthy, and includes service on the Executive Committee for the Conference of Delegates, and four years spent as a delegate. He helmed the Riverside County Bar Association from 1996-97; founded that organization’s School of Ethics and Advocacy in 1999, and has served as a judge pro tem for the Riverside Superior Court and a mediator for the Court of Appeal.
But some of Heiting’s resume entries depart from the legal norm: he served as president of The Other Bar from 1991 to 1993; he serves on the Chairman’s Council for the Betty Ford Center, and on the advisory board to the Desert Professional Recovery Program.
Although Heiting frequently — and candidly — speaks about the events that landed those entries on his resume, it was a 1997 biography in Reader’s Digest magazine that shone a national spotlight on his past.
In July 1986, Heiting blacked out while driving, crashed into another car, and severely injured a 27-year-old woman. His blood alcohol content was three times the legal limit, and Heiting was arrested.
Alone among the members of the State Bar board, Heiting has a record of public discipline.
Class President
Heiting started his life’s journey on the road to success. Born in Chicago, he was raised in Norco, in Riverside County. He was elected president of his Corona High senior class, and later became student body president and valedictorian at Riverside University. Although he initially planned to pursue a career in medicine, he shifted gears when he learned he was colorblind.
Heiting earned his law degree in 1975 from Western State University College of Law, and joined a private firm. Eventually, he hung out his own shingle, practicing law from a 12-foot by 12-foot room in Riverside, with his wife working as his secretary.
“Whenever a client would come in, I would have to ask her to leave so we could have confidential communication,” Heiting recalls with a chuckle.
One afternoon in 1979, Richard Irwin stopped by Heiting’s office to drop off a resume, and mentioned he was looking for a firm to work with for an externship program through Southwestern University.
When Heiting was told the program involved Irwin working for free, he “hired” him on the spot. Because of the tight quarters, Irwin had to work at the law library when Heiting met with clients.
Over the years, the firm moved into progressively larger quarters, finally landing this year in its current location.
Heiting and Irwin eventually started working as partners, and the firm employs five attorneys. Heiting handles primarily matters involving personal injury and medical malpractice on the plaintiff side. He also handles some defense and other civil litigation.
Gradual Process
Heiting describes the transition from class president and valedictorian to jail inmate as “a gradual process” that began when he started drinking in high school and accelerated in college.
“There was a time when it wasn’t a problem, and then there was a time where it may be a problem, and then there was a time when I couldn’t stop,” he says. “It just evolved.”
Although Heiting doesn’t remember the impact of the accident, he does remember waking up in the dark, surrounded by steam and smoke. He also remembers thinking he’d killed a family.
It wasn’t until several hours after he was jailed that he learned the car he struck contained only one occupant, and the woman had survived.
It wasn’t his first close call. Heiting had been drinking for years, but denying he had a problem. He’d even had another accident, just three months prior to the one that landed him behind bars. The first was a solo spinout on a motorcycle, in which he broke his ribs, his collarbone, and punctured a lung.
“It hurt only me,” he recalls thinking of the first accident. “That was my view at the time — that the only person hurt in the accident was me. I didn’t realize that I was hurting all of those people around me at the same time. It was a very isolated, self-centered process, and so I didn’t see what it was doing to people around me.”
The accident that involved someone else, he adds, “was quite a different story.”
Between the two accidents, Heiting estimates he attended 40 to 50 meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. But it wasn’t until he agreed to his attorney’s demand that he enroll in an inpatient program at the Betty Ford Center that he began to turn his life around.
Heiting recalls his first interview with a counselor at the Betty Ford Center.
“He asked me, ‘So, Jim do you want to get sober?’” he says. “I couldn’t’ even answer him. I was crying — I wanted to get sober so bad.”
At Betty Ford, Heiting said he found “time to focus on what I needed to focus on,” and to “get back in touch with the God of my youth.”
“It gave me time to get back in touch with my spirituality, and connect with other people; to understand that people cared and I wasn’t alone. All those things I didn’t realize before, but were probably true before.”
But it also made him face reality.
“Up until the accident, I had all the excuses in the world for not going into a treatment program and not spending time away from home,” he says. “I had my practice, I had my family, I had my clients, I had obligations and responsibilities. I couldn’t take the necessary 30 days or 28 days away from those things and spend time only focused on myself — because that would have been very selfish.
“I didn’t realize I was very selfish in drinking all the time,” he adds. “When [the accident] happened, all of those excuses fell away. The prospects were that I no longer had a family, I no longer had a business, I no longer had clients, I was going to jail, I’d killed someone. All of those things were immediately stripped away.”
Heiting spent a month in the treatment program. In June 1987, he went to jail.
“My first impression was that they were treating me like a criminal,” he recalls of the experience. “Like a dangerous dog. And it was hard to understand why they were treating me that way. But it didn’t take long to realize that they had to treat everybody that way. —I’m not a violent, aggressive, dangerous person, and so to be treated as a violent aggressive dangerous person, was kind of shocking.”
The State Bar suspended him. He was placed on probation for five years, and began to rebuild his life — one day at a time.
Irwin explains his motivation for sticking by Heiting.
“There are two sides,” he says. “I have a family member who is an alcoholic — and it’s a person I love just the same. I think we all have defects. I’m not perfect.
“Jim is a good person,” he adds. When it happened, I said it was a mistake that he made, and saw no reason to condemn him. Some of our attorneys did jump ship, but I didn’t consider it to be a fatal defect.”
Heiting has been sober for 16 years, and devotes a significant amount of time to helping others achieve sobriety — and maintaining his own.
New Life
In September 1996, Heiting took office as president of the Riverside County Bar Association.
Associate Justice James Ward from the Fourth District Court of Appeal in Riverside says people who knew Heiting during his presidency “gave him high marks for his ability to get things done.”
Observing that Heiting quickly convened a meeting of district bar leaders to discuss common issues, Ward says the new governor is “off to a good start already.”
Riverside attorney John Vineyard initially announced his intent to run for the seat for which Heiting was ultimately unopposed.
“I think he will do a good job,” Vineyard says. “I would have run, if I didn’t think he would.”
Vineyard served on the RCBA board when Heiting headed the organization, and describes Heiting as being “very interested in what’s best for lawyers, locally and statewide.”
“He’s very passionate about the issues in which he’s interested, and he tends to follow through and finish what he starts.”
Vineyard describes Heiting as a leader who takes a “hands-on approach,” but who is also “very good at delegating when it’s appropriate.”
“He’s good at getting a consensus,” Vineyard adds. “We worked very well as a board under him.”
Irwin describes Heiting as a “people person” who “cares a lot about how lawyers are perceived by the public.
“As an attorney, he’s very compassionate and caring about his clients,” Irwin says. “He is acutely concerned about his professionalism and ethics. It is very important to him. It’s part of the reason we’ve been associated for so long—that’s where we both come from.”
Heiting, Irwin states, is also “very aggressive and very driven to do the best he can for his clients.”
“He cares about his reputation and cares about the job he does,” he adds. “He cares about attorneys being at a higher level in terms of integrity and compassion. Some guys are in it for the money, but Jim—he won’t sacrifice those ideals of integrity and professionalism to make money.”
Conference Delegate
Heiting became involved with the State Bar during the annual meeting in 1993, when he noticed the Conference of Delegates gathering and wondered “what the heck was going on.” He became a delegate, and found he enjoyed the work of the conference.
He also became active in the development of the State Bar’s new Attorney Diversion Program. He calls the program “really, really important,” and says he intends to remain “very intimately involved,” admitting he has “a lot of experience to bring to the table.” But he doesn’t consider the program to be a pet project.
“I hope I’m not so limited,” he explains.
He finds the unauthorized practice of law to be “an interesting topic,” and says he hopes to become involved in the State Bar’s efforts to address the issue. He also hopes to be involved in the reemergence of a Bench-Bar-Media Committee at the statewide level, and said he would like to be involved in the development of an ethics school which attorneys could be ordered to attend rather than being subjected to sanctions.
Access to justice is also high on Heiting’s list, and he points out that the issue has been important to the State Bar and to Chief Justice Ronald George. Heiting intends to propose a program dubbed “Cal-Law,” which would operate similar to Medi-Cal, but for legal issues.
“It would give lawyers who otherwise don’t have dynamic practices an opportunity to make some money—modest money—but some money,” he explains. “And it would fill the needs of the people who otherwise can’t afford lawyers. It would serve the needs of the courts because the pro pers would be less.”
Heiting admits he’s not certain how the Board of Governors will receive his proposal.
“I think we can balance the whole issue,” he says. “Or this might be too creative. I don’t know.”
Future Outlook
Heiting intends to take his future one step at a time.
“I want to get through the first year on the Board of Governors and be as effective as I can be,” he says. “The second year, I’d like to be more effective, and the third year, be very effective. And at that point in time, I’ll study the options.”
In his spare time, Heiting enjoys reading and fishing. He and his wife, Cindy, own a condo at Lake June, and Heiting says he goes fishing on opening day in the High Sierras each season.
He also enjoys playing horseshoes, and rides his motorcycle when he finds time.
In the near future, though, Heiting expects to be “dedicated to the job at hand.” He intends to be as visible as possible in every part of his district, and cited former District Six Governor Michael Case as having set the standard he hopes to maintain.
“He was great,” Heiting said. “Michael Case was here all the time. If I can follow up on [Case’s and Herman’s] example, I’ll be doing something.
“I’ll be responsible,” he adds. “I will be reaching out to the different entities and people in our district and asking them for input. I can’t do this by myself. I’ve learned that over the years. I’m going to need help. And I need ideas. So if they want to have some input—give me a call.”
Copyright 2002, Metropolitan News Company