HON. Kelvin D. Filer
Judge

Superior Court of California County of Los Angeles

  PROFILE  

Career Highlights: Appointed by Gov. Gray Davis to Los Angeles Superior Court, 2002; elevated by unification to Los Angeles Superior Court, 2000; commissioner, Los Angeles Municipal Court (Compton), 1993-2000; sole practitioner, 1982-93; deputy statepublic defender, 1980-82

By Don Ray
Daily Journal Staff Writer

     The lone picketer outside the Great Western Forum was undaunted. Not even free tickets to the Lakers game could entice the diehard fan into putting down his “Fan On Strike” sign and enjoying the first game of the 1998-99 season — a season that had been delayed by an owner’s lockout.
     Nobody paid him any mind, until one young fan shouted out to his buddies.
     “Hey, man, see that dude? He’s my judge!”
     Actually, the picketer was a Compton Municipal Court commissioner. Today, Kelvin D. Filer is a Superior Court judge.
     He’s still in Compton, still a diehard Lakers fan and still ready to square off against what he believes is injustice.
     He says it’s in his blood. His parents were both involved in the civil rights struggle of the ’50s and ’60s.
     “I was picketing before I could walk,” Filer said. “Someone would say, ‘Daddy’s going to walk the picket line,’ and I’d say, ‘Can I go?’”
     He remembers the time the family was on vacation in another state, and they walked into a hotel. When his father didn’t see any black employees there, he turned around and walked out the door.
     “He went to the car and pulled signs out of the trunk,” Filer said, “and we all picketed the hotel.”
     The signs read “End Segregation. End Discrimination.”
     His mother, Blondell Filer, made the signs back then. She also made the sign for her son’s Lakers protest. She’s been painting picket signs for half a century.
     One of the judge’s favorites was aimed at the maker of paper towels.
     “Leave Zee Towels on zee shelf,” it read.
     This time, however, his complaint was about basketball and the money it generates.
     “The players said, ‘We need to get a contract to get rid of the salary cap.’ The owners were worried about paying higher salaries,” Filer said. “I didn’t hear anybody talking about what’s in the best interest of the fans.”
     To Filer, it all added up to one thing: injustice.
     He thought the best solution would be for the owners to freeze the ticket prices.
     “I said, ‘If they come back, and I don’t hear any part about them freezing the prices or lowering the prices, I’m going to go on strike,’” he said. “‘In fact, I’m going to picket the first game.’”
     He may not have made any impression on the Lakers management, but he did make the 11 o’clock news.
     Filer, 49, is not what you’d call a spectator or a bystander. He’s out there. He’s energetic, flamboyant and passionate, just like his father, Maxcy Filer.
     The elder Filer is a legend in the Compton community for being a civic leader and activist. And he’s a legend in the legal community for his dogged persistence. He took the State Bar Exam a record 48 times over a three-decade period before he passed.
     “When I was sworn in, they said, ‘Perseverance, perseverance, perseverance,’” he recalled. “I pointed to my head and said, ‘Masochist, masochist, masochist.’”
     The younger Filer lived a good part of his life in the shadow of his flamboyant father, but he has earned his own reputation of being a hardworking jurist, a judge who shows respect for the law, the court and everyone who enters his courtroom.
     “He has one of the best judicial temperaments I’ve ever seen displayed on the bench,” Bruce E. Brodie said.
     Brodie is the head deputy of the central operations of the alternate public defender’s office in Los Angeles.
     “His courtroom is a wonderful place to practice law, no matter which side you’re on,” Brodie said.
     He said he’s impressed with the judge’s patience but suggests that Filer may, at times, be too patient.
     “He gives people so many chances, and he’s so patient and so understanding that people might think that’s a sign of weakness,” Brodie said, “and they might take advantage of him.”
     John T. Anthony, however, has been at the receiving end of Filer’s patience and says it made his first trial a wonderful experience.
     Anthony is a third-year Loyola Law School student and a certified law clerk working in the Compton office of the Los Angeles County district attorney.
     His first appearance involved questioning potential jurors. When he was premature in excusing a juror during voir dire, Filer very gently suggested he wait.
     “I didn’t know the process,” Anthony said. “I noticed that he didn’t scold me in a way that would prejudice me in front of the jury. It just shows how much respect he commands by himself without having to overexert himself.”
     Deputy District Attorney Christopher D. Grigg said Anthony was lucky to be in front of a judge who tells you the right answer in a way that doesn’t make you look bad.
     “That’s a big concern for lawyers,” Grigg said. “Some will berate you from the bench — on the record.
     “I think Judge Filer is a very fair and evenhanded judge. He allows attorneys to do what they need to do.”
     Deputy Public Defender Robin S. Ginsberg says she enjoys practicing law in Filer’s courtroom.
     “He’s extremely pleasant to be in front of. He’s superfair,” Ginsberg said. “I think Judge Filer is great.”
     Even in tense situations, Brodie says, Filer is able to help everyone remain calm.
     “All of us being human, our patience runs thin,” Brodie said. “His remarkable quality is to have the patience to give someone another opportunity to regain control of themselves.”
     Filer says he learned the craft of keeping people calm and orderly when he was an elected official in Compton.
     “I think serving as the president of the school board helped me become the judge that I am,” Filer said, “because we used to have some of the most raucous meetings.”
     His journey to public office, the bench and picketing the Lakers began there in Compton in 1955. He’s the third-born of seven children. He has three brothers and three sisters.
     His childhood, he says, was made up of a lot of love, a lot of community involvement and a lot of lessons learned.
     When his father wasn’t working three or four jobs, he was studying law, the judge says. However, Kelvin Filer’s own decision to study law came while the family was on a camping trip.
     “We’d get in the pool, and everybody else gets out because we were black,” Filer recalled.
     Later, he says, he and his cousins waited their turn to play ping-pong, but when that time came, everybody else left.
     “We didn’t have anybody to play with,” he said. “I was just a little boy.”
     Even though the other kids weren’t vicious, Filer says, it pointed out wrongs that someone needed to right.
     “‘That’s when I said, ‘I’m going to be a lawyer.’ That’s who people were talking about when they said, ‘What do the lawyers say we should do to fight this?’ My whole thing was, ‘I’m going to be a lawyer so I can fight for the underdog,’” Filer said.
     After he graduated from Compton High School in 1973, Filer attended the University of California, Santa Cruz, and set his sights on the best law school he could get into.
     He hit the target when he was accepted at Boalt Hall.
     In 1980, he graduated and passed the State Bar on his first try. He went to the State Bar office when the results came out.
     His father also had taken the exam but didn’t go with him that morning.
     “When I came home,” the senior Filer recalled, “he said, ‘Daddy, I passed!’ And I started hugging him and kissing him.
     “‘But you didn’t.’
     “I said, ‘That’s OK. I’m happy you did. Today is your day.’”
     It was a bittersweet moment for the younger Filer.
     “He was just crying and hugging me,” Filer said of his father. “I started crying because he didn’t pass.”
     When his father passed the bar in 1991, Filer says, they had the party of all parties and watched the news coverage of Maxcy Filer’s perseverance.
     “We had about 15 minutes of fame,” his son said.
     After he passed the bar, the younger Filer spent two years working as a lawyer for the office of the state public defender, an agency formed a few years earlier to represent indigent criminal defendants on appeal.
     In 1982, he went into private practice in Compton and hired his father as a law clerk.
     “He paid me weakly,” his father said smiling. “W-E-A-K-L-Y.”
     Their 15 minutes of fame evolved into two more years of fame in the late 1990s when television producers fashioned a sitcom after Filer and his father. The program, “Sparks,” ran on the UPN network and was centered on a father and son practicing law together in Compton.
     The judge’s younger brother, Anthony S. Filer, is also an attorney. He works at Community Legal Services in Norwalk. He says his brother has a passion for his job unlike anyone he’s ever seen.
     “He can’t wait for Monday to come so he can go back to work,” Anthony Filer said.
     The judge calls his the best job in the world.
     “I look forward to coming to work every single day,” Filer said. “I get here early. I stay late. That’s just me. I have a ball.”
     One of those late nights in his chambers, Filer wanted some flavored coffee but ran into a snag.
     “I said, ‘Oh, man, I ran out of flavored coffee,’ so I just dropped a piece of candy in the filter of the coffee maker to see if it melted,” he remembered.
     The next morning everyone complimented him on the coffee. In an instant, the idea of Filer’s Flavored Filters was born.
     Today, the judge proudly displays his very own, official U.S. patent for his idea and, when he’s not on duty, passes out flyers to potential investors.
     Filer says he checked it out with court officials, and they told him it’s perfectly legal and ethical to have an outside business.
     “I’m hoping I can get Magic Johnson interested in it,” he said.
     When Filer isn’t at work, he, of course, watches Lakers games and plays on a lawyers’ basketball team every Thursday night with his brother Anthony and a group of friends.
     He also enjoys spending time with his two daughters, Brynne and Kree Filer. Brynne is in college; Kree is a ninth-grader. Filer is divorced and has joint custody of the girls.
     The always-jovial judge turns serious when he remembers his marriage falling apart and how much he worried about not being the best father he could be.
     “I felt at that time that I really was trying to treat my problems in the wrong way,” he said. “I was drinking too much.
     “Now I no longer drink, but it was a real, real tough period in my life, mainly because I was concerned about my daughters.”
     Nowadays, he writes poetry, usually about his life experiences. He likes to write letters to the editor — not as many as he did before he was a judge — and he enjoys singing.
     “My goal in life,” he said, “is to sing the national anthem for a Lakers game.”
     He keeps his voice in shape by singing with family members in a makeshift band.
     He’s the lay leader of the First United Methodist Church in Compton, and he volunteers to help younger people, whether they’re wannabe lawyers or members of street gangs whom Filer thinks he can reach before they get in trouble. He spends many of his lunch hours talking to students and other young people.
     “I think we all have the responsibility to not only serve in this capacity in the community but also to serve in the community,” Filer said.
     More than anything, Filer treasures his family, he said. It’s not uncommon, he said, for his father to come into his courtroom to watch Scooter — that’s what his father has always called him — while he’s on the bench.
     His father has been known to cross the bar without permission — and risk his son’s playful threat of contempt.
     “He’s going to hold me in contempt?” his father asks with a smile. “I tell him, ‘You can’t hold me in contempt, dad blast it! I can hold you in contempt! You might be the judge, but you won’t always be a judge. I’ll forever be your father!’”