Nearly three years ago, I wrote about the California Bar’s misguided attempt to limit public access to its records. By using a bit of lawyerly kung fu, the bar sought to occupy a little island of non-transparency unique among government agencies.

The first step was avoiding the Public Records Act. Easily done; as part of the judiciary, the Bar is exempted from the Public Records Act. But the problem is that court records are subject to similar openness requirements under both the First Amendment and common law. And that’s where the second step comes in: The Bar isn’t a “court”, so its records aren’t subject to these common law principles. Presto – no right for the public to see the bar’s records!

Yes, it’s embarrassing, a weasel-like argument that should shame any public servant who cares about accountability or the perception of the legal industry. But the Bar shamelessly used it against an attempt to access records, and I’ve certainly run across the same argument when dealing with regulators in other states.

So while it’s taken awhile, I was happy to see that the California Court of Appeals finally rapped the Bar’s knuckles and dumped its quest for lawyer-regulatory-exceptionalism. Score one for transparency.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 13th, 2011 at 2:29 pm by Josh King, VP of Business Development and General Counsel and is filed under Josh King Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.