Administrative Law
Agency Counseling
As outside counsel to agencies and boards throughout the state, we do everything from advising clients on administrative procedure and open-government laws to defending our clients’ administrative decisions in trial and appellate courts, where we have a long track record of success. Representative clients include the California Department of Insurance, the California Earthquake Authority, the Los Angeles Unified School District, and the South Coast Air Quality Management District Hearing Board – the air-pollution control agency for the 17 million people living in the Southern California air basin.
Rulemaking
We bring our years of experience to helping government entities draft and develop rules and regulations that will stand up in court. With the California Insurance Commissioner, we’ve developed and defended regulations implementing Proposition 103, the Unfair Insurance Practices Act, and the Commissioner’s program for regulating title insurance rates. We’ve also helped the Los Angeles Unified School District develop and defend rules and policies on issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic and making facilities available to charter schools.
Insurance Regulation & Enforcement
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We have played a pivotal role in the implementation of Proposition 103, the insurance reform enacted by the voters in 1988, which led to the overhauling of California’s rate regulation program. In addition to designing the program and drafting its regulations, our attorneys have successfully defended Prop 103 against repeated challenges brought by the insurance industry.
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We served as lead counsel in the California Department of Insurance’s successful prosecution of the health insurance company PacifiCare Life & Health Insurance for over 900,000 violations of the Unfair Insurance Practices Act. The enforcement action, which spanned more than three years, resulted in a $173.6 million penalty being imposed against the insurer in 2014, the largest penalty award in the Department of Insurance’s history. Since 2014, we have continued to represent the Department in PacifiCare’s challenges to the decision and penalty in the courts. In PacifiCare Life and Health Ins. Co. v. Jones (2018) 27 Cal. App. 5th 391, we successfully defended the validity of the three regulations under which PacifiCare was prosecuted. Litigation regarding the specific violation categories is ongoing.
