February 27, 2022 – As of late Saturday night, it appears that all State Bar records, confidential and public, have been removed from the site, with a note confirming this on the site. We are continuing to investigate.
February 26, 2022 – The State Bar announced today that it is taking urgent action to address a breach of confidential attorney discipline case data that it discovered on February 24. A public website that aggregates nationwide court case records was able to access and display limited case profile data on about 260,000 nonpublic State Bar attorney discipline case records, along with about 60,000 public State Bar Court case records. The site also appears to display confidential court records from other jurisdictions.
Under California Business and Professions Code 6086.1(b), all disciplinary investigations are confidential until the time that formal charges are filed, and all investigations are confidential until a formal proceeding is instituted.
The nonpublic case profile data from the State Bar appears to have been displayed on this public website in violation of this statute. It includes case number, file date, case type, case status, and respondent and complaining witness names. It does not include full case records. We do not yet know how many attorney or witness names were disclosed.
The State Bar is taking all necessary steps to address and correct this matter:
- We have retained a team of IT forensics experts to assist in our investigation.
- We have tasked our case management system software vendor, Tyler Technologies, to investigate and remediate any issues in their Odyssey case management software or this specific implementation of it.
- We have contacted the website’s hosting provider and domain name registrar requesting that the confidential data be immediately taken down. Direct contact information for the website owner is not readily available.
- We have notified law enforcement.
“We apologize to anyone to anyone who is affected by the website’s unlawful display of nonpublic data,” said Leah Wilson, Executive Director. “We take our obligations to protect confidential data with the utmost seriousness, and we are doing everything we can to ensure that we resolve this issue quickly and prevent any such breaches from recurring. We intend to act quickly to provide disclosures to affected individuals.”
The State Bar has set up a webpage to provide ongoing updates and answer questions about the data breach: calbar.ca.gov/data-breach.
The webpage will be updated with further information as it becomes available.
