Legal Advice

Question: I am a director on my homeowners association board. Four of the five directors and some of the owners rely on our management company employees for legal advice. In response to a query about a recall action, one correspondence from management stated: "I believe it is inappropriate but not sure about legal for the board to support this."

A Hollywood director who pleaded guilty in 2006 to lying to the FBI about his dealings with convicted private eye Anthony Pellicano may be entitled to withdraw his plea, an appeals court ruled Tuesday. "Die Hard" and "Predator" director John McTiernan had argued he would not have admitted to the charge, for which he was sentenced to four months in prison, if his attorney at the time had given him better legal advice. Last year, a U.S. district court judge denied his motion to rescind his plea.

Question: Our homeowners association president is an office manager for a large law firm. She is not a licensed attorney but states her opinions as if she were. Because of her position with the law firm, board members and owners accept and believe what she says as gospel. She got us involved with another law firm that represents only the board. Now she tells us that the board also is being counseled by a second law firm. Are we homeowners being put in the path of danger?

Los Angeles County supervisors restored a policy Tuesday that makes public many of the memos that county attorneys send supervisors when advising them to settle legal claims that cost the county millions of dollars each year. The supervisors did not rule out the possibility of making parts of the documents confidential in the future but said they needed a clearer explanation from their top attorney to justify such a move, which would reverse more than a decade of openness.

In an unusual move widely viewed as a swipe at City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo, the Los Angeles City Council is getting a lawyer to provide it with independent legal advice, officials confirmed Thursday. The attorney was hired by and will work for the chief legislative analyst, an office that answers directly to the council.

Question: Our homeowner association hired a management company whose best selling point was that it had an attorney to provide unlimited free legal advice. Yet we've found that we cannot call the attorney directly. The procedure for utilizing this free legal advice entails us calling the management company owner, who in turn calls the attorney and asks him our question. The management company then calls the board back and gives us the attorney's answer or advice.

Los Angeles attorney Randol Schoenberg was just a boy when he first saw Vienna, the hometown of his grandfather Arnold, the composer. At the national art museum in baroque Belvedere Castle, his mother stood in a roomful of paintings by Gustav Klimt and pointed to the shimmering portrait of a sultry, enigmatic beauty suspended in gold. Schoenberg never forgot the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, which was seized by the Nazis in 1938 and delivered to the museum with the salutation "Heil Hitler."

They call her the rice and beans lady. Eight years ago, Barbara Perrigo loaded up her car with homemade food and pulled up at a clearing on the side of Cannon Road, less than a mile from the turnoff for Legoland. She sent her sons into the scrubby bushes, down steep paths dotted with hidden shacks, shouting "comida," or "food." Perrigo has been there every Sunday since, feeding as many as 60 farmworkers at the peak of strawberry season.

As a Republican partisan, John G. Roberts Jr. worked to give legal advice to President Bush's team in Florida in its fight over the election of 2000. Forget his minority position on reproductive choice, his ultra-right-wing history, his rich-white-guy status, all of which I see as reasons we should have a different choice for the Supreme Court. His role in deciding the 2000 election for Bush is enough to discredit him as a nominee for Supreme Court justice. For if ever there was a partisan decision that over half the country disagreed with (remember the popular vote)

When Juan Antonio Sigala was arrested in Puerto Rico by U.S. immigration agents in 1998 and faced deportation, he knew whom to call for help: South Pasadena attorney Enrique Arevalo. Sigala, who had gone to San Juan for an AIDS conference, knew of Arevalo from listening to the lawyer's Spanish-language radio show in Los Angeles that focuses on immigration law.