LAKEPORT, Calif. – After nearly 20 years and thousands of cases, a Lake County Superior Court judge is bidding farewell to full-time work on the bench.
Judge David Herrick has officially retired, although he plans to continue to work part-time for the Lake County Superior Court, where he’s presided over Department 1 for the past 18 years.
A retirement party for Herrick was held in his courtroom last Thursday, Jan. 3, 18 years to the day after he first took his oath of office and on his last day sitting as a full-time judge.
Herrick, 64, will be succeeded by Michael Lunas, elected in November. Lunas will be sworn in on Monday, Nov. 7.
At the Jan. 3 gathering, his fellow judges lauded Herrick for his intelligence, mentoring, patience, sense of humor, affable nature and the respect he shows to all those who enter his courtroom.
Last year, when Herrick’s term was coming up for reelection, he decided it was time to retire.
Everyone, he said, eventually starts to feel their mortality. “At some point it becomes less about money and more about quality of life,” said Herrick.
While Herrick acknowledged that it may have been smart to sign up and run for another term, “It’s become more important to me to spend more time with family and doing things that I enjoy doing.”
For Herrick, family includes wife of 32 years, Cheryl; his daughter, Leigh-Anne, married and living in Santa Rosa; his mother, who lives in Chico; and his two siblings, a brother in Colusa and a sister in Cottonwood.
Herrick and his wife are looking forward to being able to take more trips to some of their favorite destinations, including Hawaii, Palm Springs and Giants games in the Bay Area. He’s also an avid golfer, and plans to spend more time out on the courses.
Herrick came to Lake County in 1975, working as a deputy district attorney before going into private practice and eventually running for, and winning, the Department 1 seat.
Northern California has always been his home. Herrick grew up the oldest of three children in the Sacramento Valley town of Tudor, about 12 miles south of Yuba City in Sutter County.
His grandparents had come west looking for a new life, leaving the Midwest during the depths of the Great Depression and Dust Bowl.
Herrick’s grandfather established a family farm in California of close to 300 acres. There, his parents, grandparents and uncles all made their homes and farmed a wide variety of crops and raised livestock. The family also would own a farm equipment dealership.
An afterthought leads to a career
After graduating from Yuba City High School in 1966, Herrick went off to college at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, where he studied accounting.
None of Herrick’s family members practiced law, and Herrick himself came to it as an “afterthought.”
With a major in business administration, Herrick said he was headed toward a career as a certified public accountant. “I was having a few second thoughts about it.”
He had taken every possible accounting class and even tutored in the major, and said he was becoming bored. At around the same time, a few of his fraternity brothers were preparing to take the Law School Admission Test, or LSAT, and Herrick said he decided to do so as well, having become intrigued with the idea of studying the law.
He got a high score on the LSAT and decided to enter law school. However, by the time he had made his decision to apply it was late in the year and most of the incoming classes were filled up.
He put in his application to the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, received his undergraduate degree from UOP in 1970 and went to work at Levi Strauss’ San Francisco headquarters for 15 months while waiting to enter UC Hastings, which he did in 1971.
Sitting next to him in his classes, where seating was arranged by alphabetical order, was a young man named Stephen Hedstrom. The two were on the same law school track, and later would take their bar exams at the same time following graduation in 1974. Hedstrom today serves as judge in Lake County Superior Court Department 4.
Once he had received his law degree, “I didn't really know what I was going to do after I graduated,” Herrick said.
He got his bar exam results in June of 1975 and began sending out resumes to law firms throughout Northern California. His resume eventually would be passed to Robert Crone, then Lake County’s senior deputy district attorney and later himself a Lake County Superior Court judge.
Crone called Herrick to see if he was interested in a job, and on Dec. 1, 1975, Herrick started work as a deputy district attorney.
At that time, the District Attorney’s Office was far smaller than it is now, with District Attorney David Luce, Crone, Herrick and another deputy district attorney making up the entire staff.
Herrick said he remained with the Lake County District Attorney’s Office until the late summer of 1978, when he went into private practice.
While working as a deputy district attorney, he again met up with Hedstrom, who was working in Lake County as a defense attorney. Herrick said of Hedstrom that there are “a lot of very bizarre parallels between his career and mine.”
In 1986, both men would run for district attorney – Hedstrom in Lake County and Herrick in Colusa County, where his family was living at that time. “He was elected, I wasn’t,” Herrick said.
Herrick can’t remember exactly when he started thinking about becoming a judge, but it was early in, during his time as a deputy district attorney.
“Of all the jobs I could aspire to, being a judge was the ultimate for me,” he said, adding, “I felt like it suited my abilities and my temperament.”
When some of the county’s justice court judges retired he did informal campaigning, and also submitted an application when a position opened up with the Colusa County Justice Court in the late 1980s.
Then Judge John Golden decided to retire in 1994, and Herrick said pursuing Golden’s seat seemed like the natural thing for him to do.
But winning the seat in the 1994 judicial race was far from easy. Herrick had stiff competition from fellow attorney Peter Windrem, with Herrick finishing second to Windrem in the June primary. He said Windrem was only about 200 votes short of being elected outright in the primary.
Herrick geared up for the fall election by mounting a time consuming, energetic door-to-door campaign, spending the next several months working full-time to win the race, which he did, by about 400 to 500 votes. He took office Jan. 3, 1995.
Developing a style
Once on the bench, a judge must develop a style, said Herrick.
“There is an intuitive element to style,” he said. “I think it’s determined a lot based on your personality, how you generally approach people.”
He added, “It’s also influenced by the judges you practice before most frequently.”
Judge Golden, who served 20 years on the Lake County Superior Court Bench, had influenced him, as had Judge Richard E. Patton of Colusa County, who had overseen both murder trials of serial killer Juan Corona.
“Each of them had styles that were very different than my style but in developing your style you use the things that you like, that you find to be efficient and fair and all things good,” he said.
Herrick felt being a judge was what he was meant to do.
As for traits that have served him well in the job, Herrick noted, “I’ve been told by a lot of people that I’m extremely patient,” he said. “I would say that I am not as rigid as many judges that I know.”
He said he also has a relaxed, conservative and thorough approach on the bench.
“I still, to this day, write my decisions,” he said, holding up a yellow notepad. Handwriting decisions, he said, allows him to explain thoroughly what he’s doing and why he’s doing it. “I think litigants deserve that.”
That thoroughness became taxing in his early days as a judge. At one point he was known for writing 15-page decisions in small claims cases, which he said got him in trouble. “You don’t have time to do that.”
For much of his career he’s given decisions orally, and even had a Friday afternoon time slot to deliver such decisions. The court reporter takes down his ruling and “that becomes my written decision.”
Herrick called himself “sort of a dinosaur.”
Pointing to an impressive wall of legal volumes – hundreds lining the wall floor to ceiling in his chambers – he said, “I still pull out the books,” even though decisions can be looked up online.
A changing court
In his time both as an attorney and a judge, Herrick has seen the courts change technologically and culturally.
“This court and all of the courts in California have evolved light years since I started practicing law,” he said.
On the technological side, there is the now considerable use of computers, which has given rise to the ability to conduct research online, transfer documents and e-file.
The Lake County Superior Court has expanded from one judge to four plus a commissioner, all working on busy civil and criminal calendars. Much of the increased workload came as a result of the superior and justice courts being consolidated, he said.
To handle the workload, Herrick has helped develop calendars and scheduling to keep the courts running smoothly.
While all of Lake County’s judges work on a variety of case types, Herrick’s court over the last seven years has evolved into a caseload primarily dedicated to civil matters. “I had the civil calendar and it just stuck,” he said.
He also has dealt, to a lesser degree, with felony criminal settlement conferences, done some criminal arraignments and remained on call for search warrants. “I’ve actually done a search warrant on the golf course.”
He said Judge Golden had once told him, “Give me a civil case anytime,” and Herrick said he feels the same way, as civil cases run the gamut of interesting subject matter.
One of the big changes he’s seen is the “explosion” of self-represented litigants. On some of his court calendars 95 percent of the litigants are self-represented. “It’s very difficult,” he said, explaining that he can’t give them advice yet he needs to help them through the process, which can be especially time consuming.
More recently, there also has been more call for mediation, as well as sentence bargaining and the demands of state correctional realignment, which is sending more work to local courts.
Even though his retirement is just beginning, Herrick – who said he’s looking forward to continuing to work on part-time assignments in the local courts – already is getting set to go back to work. He’s scheduled to preside over a jury trial that starts later this week.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
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