The Times’ Ryan and Hamilton Earn Collier Prize for Investigative Series Focusing on the California State Bar
The $25,000 award, offered by the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, is one of the largest journalism prizes in the nation.
Los Angeles Times Investigative Reporters Harriet Ryan and Matt Hamilton have earned the Collier Prize for State Government Accountability for a series about failures by the California State Bar to regulate and enforce the integrity of lawyers in the state.
The $25,000 award, offered by the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications, is one of the largest journalism prizes in the nation. The prize was awarded at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in Washington, D.C., on April 29.
The duo’s winning series documented shortcomings in the California State Bar’s regulation of lawyers in a two-year investigation that culminated in 2022. The articles revealed numerous ways that the state bar repeatedly failed to police wealthy and prominent members of the legal community, including Tom Girardi, who misappropriated millions of dollars from clients over decades and racked up more than 150 complaints before the agency took public action. At the same time, the investigation revealed that the bar has historically trained its firepower on vulnerable individuals without the money, power or political connections to put up a fight.
The reporting resulted in reforms, government investigations, increased transparency and new legislation, including a full-scale overhaul of the bar’s disciplinary system, a series of investigations into high-profile lawyers and new regulations governing the bank accounts that hold client settlement money. In addition, the state bar agreed to support a new mandatory reporting law that would require lawyers to turn in colleagues who commit misconduct.
One of the prize’s judges lauded the reporters for “unraveling this tangled web of corruption and exposing how the wealthy could get away with it for years.”
Another judge noted: “Justice is supposed to be blind, but when it comes to the California State Bar, the reporters were able to conclusively show how African American lawyers were met with unequal treatment for relatively minor infractions while white attorneys were able to skate.”
For more information about the Collier Prize for State Government Accountability, visit the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications website.
