Confidential Record Leak Leaves CalBar, Lawyers, Clients Exposed

California’s state bar association, which is responsible for licensing and regulating more than 250,000 lawyers in the most populous US state, is itself under scrutiny for a data leak that allowed confidential client complaint and attorney disciplinary record data to be captured by a free court records website.

As many as 322,500 such documents were vacuumed up by JudyRecords.com between October 2021 and February 2022, according to a proposed class action filed against the California bar by two lawyers, a former judge, and three people with attorney grievances, all of whom are proceeding anonymously.

When a state bar experiences a ...