State Bar Executive Director Leah Wilson resigns after exam debacle

State Bar Executive Director Leah Wilson said Friday she will step down in response to the disastrous rollout of the new bar exam in February. The move will be effective July 7, according to a news release, when she will "retire from state service."

"I am deeply grateful to the Board of Trustees for their confidence in my leadership, even during challenging times," Wilson said in the release. "While I leave proud of my accomplishments, I remain deeply regretful about the rollout of the February 2025 bar exam and its impact on both thousands of aspiring attorneys and the State Bar's ability to make much-needed changes to the process of attorney licensure."

Wilson joined the bar as chief operations officer in 2015 after a stint as executive officer for the Alameda County Superior Court. She was the bar's executive director from 2017 to the beginning of 2020. But she stayed involved with the bar in an advisory role and resumed the director job again in 2021.

Her tenure covered some of the most momentous and controversial chapters in the bar's 98-year history. In 2018, the bar separated its regulatory and associational functions by creating the California Lawyers Association. In 2020, a federal judge in Chicago froze the assets of celebrity plaintiffs' attorney Tom Girardi after finding he had stolen at least $2 million in client funds; the bar later disclosed it had received at least 115 complaints about Girardi without ever publicly disciplining him. In recent years, the bar also sparred with state lawmakers over its spending of funds to explore regulatory proposals around legal software and law firm ownership.

But the February exam appears to have been the last straw for Wilson's tenure--though it might not mark the last high-profile departure from the bar. Despite widespread opposition from attorneys and policymakers, the bar abandoned the Multistate Bar Examination in favor of creating its own multiple-choice test.

The first test administration, on Feb. 25 and 26, was a disaster. Early headlines focused on connection problems, lag times and unsaved test sections attributed to remote test proctor Meazure Learning. But recent weeks have seen a growing outcry about the new test questions. Last month, the bar admitted that 29 of the questions were developed using ChatGPT by ACS Learning, a company contracted to evaluate the effectiveness of the new exam.

The bar later shared data showing a disproportionate number of these questions were flagged for "performance issues." This included six questions omitted from scoring because of "negative discrimination." This means that test takers who did better on the exam were more likely to get them wrong than those who performed less well on the overall exam.

The new exam was partly intended to help the cash-strapped agency save money, but it will probably have the opposite effect. The bar is facing lawsuits from disgruntled test takers and a Senate bill calling for an audit. It signed an $8.25 million, five-year deal with Kaplan Test Prep last year, but is now facing widespread calls to abandon the new exam. On Tuesday, the bar's director of admissions, Audrey Ching, told its Contracts Committee there could be over 10,000 people taking the July exam, including some as-yet unknown numbers taking a free retest.

Wilson is the second high-profile departure from the bar in just over a month. Bridget Gramme, the bar's special counsel for consumer protection, admissions, access and inclusion, left on March 28.

In the news release, State Bar Board of Trustees Chair Brandon Stallings praised Wilson's "significant contributions" and said the "board will initiate a search for a new executive director in the coming weeks."

Heather L. Rosing was the first president of the California Lawyers Association, served on the bar's board of trustees and was part of the search committee that first brought Wilson to the bar. She credited Wilson with bringing "professional management to that organization," especially during the split to focus professional regulation.

"Obviously there have been some issues with the current bar exam, but in my mind that is not her legacy," said the founding partner with Rosing Pott & Strohbehn in San Diego. "Her legacy is in taking something that was association oriented and through a lot of hard work transforming it into a functioning public protection agency."

"One person is not responsible for the many levels of poor decision making that resulted in the February bar exam debacle," said Mary Basick, assistant dean for academic skills at UC Irvine School of Law, in an email.

Basick, who has been an outspoken critic of the bar in the wake of the test, added, "Given the volume and magnitude of deficiencies revealed by the February bar exam administration, it is important to fully investigate how this occurred and identify the steps needed to prevent future ineptitude. The public, profession, and future lawyers deserve as much."