California Bar Asks Court to Expand Supervised Practice Program

California’s program allowing bar applicants to practice under an attorney’s supervision should be expanded to offer relief for February bar takers, the State Bar said Friday in a petition to the California Supreme Court.

The provisional license program was first implemented in 2020 for applicants who graduated law school at the start of Covid-19. The Bar asked the court to extend the program, currently set to expire at the end of 2025, until at least the end of 2027.

Applicants would still need to pass the bar exam to be granted full licenses. The only change to the program would be a new fee for participants, the Bar said. Just over 70 people remain in the cohort, but expanding it for anyone who didn’t pass or withdrew from the February bar would make 3,340 people eligible, the petition said.

California’s provisionally licensed participants “have had lower complaint, investigation, and charge rates than the active-attorney population as a whole,” the filing said.

The remedy proposal comes as the Bar contends with extended fallout from the exam that crashed widely on test day.

After applicants sat for the exam, the Bar admitted its non-lawyer contractor wrote 29 multiple choice questions for the exam using ChatGPT. The Bar said in a Thursday email to test takers it moved nine more applicants’ scores from “fail” to “pass” after taking a closer look at their exams. That brings the total number of applicants the Bar says it mistakenly failed to 13 since May 14, when the Bar first announced its review of scoring errors.

California lawmakers are urging an audit of the exam, and test takers and the Bar have filed lawsuits against the vendor whose platform crashed on test day. The Supreme Court allowed the bar to lower its passing score for February takers to accommodate for the disruption, and a record number of applicants passed.

The Bar on Friday also asked the Supreme Court to offer special admission to February exam takers who are licensed and in good standing in other US jurisdictions, which would allow them to practice, with limits, in California.

It urged the court to ease admissions requirements for out-of-state attorneys more broadly.

Efforts in the legislature this year to drop the mandate they pass the general bar exam or attorneys’ exam to be fully licensed in California have stalled. But the Bar said the court should consider adopting a process to admit the attorneys on motion if the law is amended in the future.

The Bar additionally asked the court to allow the roughly 1,350 remaining applicants who got a score boost from partaking in the November experimental exam to apply it in a 2026 sitting.