Former California Bar Leader Reflects on Botched Exam, Girardi

The California State Bar‘s botched February bar exam has gotten plenty of attention over the past several months. But it’s not the only critical juncture the organization’s faced.

Over the past eight years, the Bar also split from the voluntary California Lawyers Association, dealt with revelations that convicted ex-lawyer Tom Girardi used his influence at the agency to bury hundreds of complaints against him, and fielded concerns about racial disparities in attorney discipline.

One person led the agency through most of it: Leah Wilson. Wilson retired from state service this month and was eyeing “several months of doing really nothing” she said in an interview this month.

The former State Bar executive director shared how the Girardi scandal influenced her views on transparency and why she thinks it’s a “no brainer” that the State Bar should keep trying to develop its own exam.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What are the moments that you believe defined your State Bar leadership?

LW: These aren’t moments, but I led the State Bar through its major identity evolution from a hybrid trade association and regulatory body to a purely public protection agency.

I transformed the idea of what it means to be prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion from having a standalone committee that’s assigned to that work to fully integrating DEI within every aspect of what we do. The most visible part of that is the work around racial disparities in the attorney discipline system.

The last thing I would say is the State Bar is a data-driven organization now, and that was not the case when I came in.

Q: Can you tell me more about how you led the Bar to address racial disparities in attorney discipline?

LW: There have been allegations for years about unfair treatment of Black lawyers in the discipline system.

When the results of a study came out — it said there are significant disparities, but those are not due to racial bias, they could be explained by different numbers of complaints and all these different, exogenous factors — we did not stop there.

Many agencies would have said, “Okay, great, it’s not our fault, so we don’t need to do anything.” We said, “Well, what can we do, even understanding that this is not driven by racial bias?”

Q: You were in charge of the Bar both before and after the Girardi scandal surfaced. What was it like to lead then, and how does it impact the Bar’s work now?

LW: If I didn’t believe in radical transparency before Girardi, I certainly believe in it after. Initially, there was a decision not to release that investigation report. I really disagreed with that, and it was reversed, and we did release it.

The State Bar has leaned into conflict-of-interest requirements. We developed an entirely new, very robust whistleblower program, so our staff can feel comfortable reporting any concerns directly to the state Justice Department.

We also have the client trust account protection program and proactive regulation of client trust accounts, which allows us to have visibility into client trust accounts every year in a way that we never did before.

Q: What do you consider to be the main lessons of the February bar exam?

LW: When you’re trying to undertake major generational change in how you do something — two different major changes at once, including new content and a new way of delivering the exam — you need to appreciate and recognize the significance of what you’re doing and resource the efforts appropriately.

I received a question: “Should you have canceled the exam?” I don’t have a great answer for that, but people need to have metrics or benchmarks to make a decision like canceling an exam, or doing something very disruptive at the eleventh hour.

Q: Were there any moments when you started getting an inkling that things would go wrong?

LW: I didn’t have the kind of inklings that would cause me to say we need to consider canceling this exam. Closer to the exam, I heard all the concerns from test takers that many folks heard at the February board meeting.

That was about a week before the Bar exam, and that’s a really difficult position to be in.

Q: Should California keep trying to create its own bar exam?

LW: What has happened is a kind of a catastrophic failure in the February bar exam. Does this failure warrant a permanent retreat from the goals and values laid out in that Blue Ribbon Commission report and ultimately endorsed by the California Supreme Court? I think the answer is no.

We need to have an exam that tests the content and the skills that attorneys in California need to know. And we should be able to deliver this exam in a much more affordable and accessible manner. Remote testing is certainly part of that but so is being able to give this exam more than two times a year, which we would only be able to do if we develop our own bar exam.

To me, that’s a no-brainer. That being said, I recognize that the February experience is a huge setback, and the question will be answered politically, not just based on data.

Want to be interviewed for the California Brief? Email Maia Spoto at mspoto@bloombergindustry.com.

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