In the spirit of bar prep, let’s IRAC this. The California Bar had an issue: they looked at their budget and realized that they’d go bankrupt if they continued administering the bar as usual. Rules are rules, though; you’ve gotta have some way of determining minimum competency. To conclude, they had to hastily come up with a new, experimental, partially crafted by AI test to administer. You may have noticed that the Application part of IRAC was glossed over. That’s what the State Bar of California’s most recent lawsuit against Meazure Learning is about. Reuters has coverage:
The state bar, represented by partners from Hueston Hennigan, said it is seeking an unspecified amount of damages from Meazure. The state bar signed a $4.1 million contract with the company in September 2024 to administer the exam.
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Some test takers were unable to log into the bar exam at all, while many experienced delays, lax exam security, distracting proctors, and a copy-and-paste function that didn’t work. The state bar alleged that Meazure disabled its own spell-check feature because it froze the platform.
As if the faulty spell-check feature wasn’t enough, some test takers allege that they couldn’t even type out words without dealing with lagging letters. Few things in life inspire irrationally non-reciprocal anger quite like non-responsive keyboards. The California Bar has since tried to save face by issuing refunds and free chances to retake the horrid exam, but a fig leaf and good PR will only go so far in fixing California’s now established bad bar reputation. They ultimately decided to crawl back to the NCBE for their testing needs. While that should be a breath of relief for anyone taking the July test, suing Meazure over the February fiasco could be a great way for the Bar to get some of the heat off of their name. The payoff probably won’t be that grand, but we all know that they are willing to try anything at this point.
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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who is learning to swim, is interested in critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.
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