Key points:
- California’s State Bar is suing Meazure Learning for the catastrophic February 2025 exam failure.
- The bar seeks damages from Meazure, which had a $4.1 million contract to deliver the hybrid exam.
- The lawsuit comes amid separate class actions and mounting fallout over the state’s bar exam overhaul.
The State Bar of California has filed suit against Meazure Learning, the vendor responsible for administering the state’s February 2025 bar exam, following what it described as a complete system breakdown that left thousands of test-takers facing major disruptions. The lawsuit, filed Monday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, accuses Meazure of breaching its contract and failing to deliver a workable exam platform.
Represented by Hueston Hennigan, the State Bar is seeking unspecified damages against the Alabama-based testing provider. The bar had signed a $4.1 million contract with Meazure in September 2024 to administer the two-day, hybrid-format exam. The test was the first in the state’s shift away from the traditional Multistate Bar Exam developed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners.
According to the complaint, many examinees experienced login failures, system lags, broken typing functions, and failed copy-and-paste features. The suit alleges that Meazure even disabled its own spell-check feature to stop the platform from freezing. “Test takers reported that copy and paste, highlighting, and annotation functions did not work. Even basic typing exhibited significant lags,” the bar said in a statement.
In response, Meazure issued a statement calling the suit an attempt to “shift the blame for [the State Bar’s] flawed development process for the February exam.” The company, formed through the 2020 merger of ProctorU and Yardstick, also said it would defend itself “vigorously in court.”
The lawsuit follows the resignation announcement of State Bar Executive Director Leah Wilson, who said on Friday that she will step down in July, citing the exam failure as a key factor. “This experience has reinforced how important the integrity and reliability of our licensing processes are,” she said in a written statement.
Meazure is also facing two proposed federal class actions filed by examinees who took the February test. Those cases, currently pending in Oakland federal court, allege that Meazure’s faulty platform damaged candidates’ chances of passing and caused severe emotional and financial distress.
The California Supreme Court on Monday ordered the State Bar to revert to the National Conference of Bar Examiners' Multistate Bar Exam for the upcoming July administration, a direct rebuke of the state’s experimental shift to a standalone California-based bar exam.
For more, read the full report on Reuters.
