Criminal defense lawyers who write attorney bonds in Comal County are circling the wagons these days because of newly proposed financial disclosure requirements pending before the Comal County Bail Bond Board. The Board has proposed requiring attorneys who bond clients out of jail to disclose the same financial information to the County as a regular bail bondsman, namely, that the attorneys really do have the financial ability to cover the cost of a bail bond if the client skips court. And attorneys who write bonds in Comal County are currently organizing to oppose these requirements because they view it as a threat to their business.
This controversy in Comal County brings to a head some of the problems with attorney bonds. The main problem, as far as the County is concerned, is that the County faces difficult hurdles in trying to collect money from attorneys whose bonds have been forfeited because a client has failed to appear in court. Before a regular bail bondsman is allowed to write bonds in a county, he is required by law to show the local county bail bond board that, if a bond is forfeited, that he has non-exempt property that could be seized to satisfy a judgment against the bond. In the past, attorneys in Comal County have not been held to this same requirement.
As a result, if a judgment is rendered against an attorney for a forfeited bond, it's difficult for the county to enforce the judgment since the attorney has never listed his nonexempt property that may be subject to seizure. As a result, bail bond boards, including the one in Comal County, are increasingly reluctant to let attorneys write bail bonds and are trying to adopt rules to crack down. My prediction is that, in the next couple of years, attorneys playing pretend bondsmen will become an endangered species around here.