State Bar of California.

Senator Umberg, with Assembly Member Dixon as a coauthor, frames this measure as a recalibration of the State Bar’s governance and examination framework, beginning with a change in how the Bar’s exam proceedings fit within open-meeting requirements. The bill would specify that the Committee of Bar Examiners shall not be considered an advisory board or similar multimember body for purposes of the Bagley-Keene Open Meeting Act, altering the public-access framework around its deliberations. Alongside this, the bill imposes detailed notice provisions and coordination requirements for bar-exam administration: the Committee may not change the vendor or creator of the multiple-choice questions without 18 months’ notice (with a limited exception for the July 2025 vendor), may not authorize remote administration without two years’ notice, and must provide at least 120 days’ notice for alterations to testing software user experience or the medium in which testing materials are provided. It also requires notice if artificial intelligence is used in creating questions or grading, and allows scaling to maintain consistent exam difficulty; the Committee is to communicate and cooperate with the Law School Council and deans of ABA-accredited law schools, or their designees.

The measure also addresses license-fee governance and certain program-funding structures. It extends the current cap on the active licensee annual fee to cover 2026, setting a ceiling at four hundred dollars, and the inactive licensee fee to a ceiling of one hundred dollars, with payments due on dates set by the State Bar and potential installment options; these provisions are stated to remain in effect through January 1, 2027. In the area of affinity programs, the bill requires the California Lawyers Association or its affiliated 501(c)(3) organization to submit an annual report detailing fund usage and compliance with prohibitions on soliciting members for affinity or royalty programs involving similar products or services. The bill also revises the allocation of revenue from noninsurance and insurance affinity programs, detailing transitional distributions through 2018 and 2019, potential transfers to Cal Bar Affinity or California ChangeLawyers, and, if certain conditions are met, a continued distribution framework after 2020 with specified allocations to the California Commission on Access to Justice, California ChangeLawyers, and the California Lawyers Association, among others; the bill requires annual reporting of these funds to the Legislature, with the first report covering multiple prior years.

In addition to these governance and funding changes, the measure codifies new discipline and professional-conduct safeguards and programmatic enhancements. It adds prohibitions related to sexual relations between attorneys and clients that may lead to disciplinary action, defines the scope and conditions of those prohibitions, and preserves certain exceptions; it updates penalties for translating professional titles by non-attorneys, including civil penalties and fund-allocation provisions to support immigration-related legal services; it broadens the State Bar’s authority to certify alternative dispute resolution firms, providers, or practitioners with criteria that include ethics standards for neutrals and complaint procedures, establishes higher levels of certification based on accountability and consumer protection measures (while ensuring these levels do not assess quality in a general sense), and authorizes a reasonable-costs-based certification fee structure. The bill also clarifies the State Bar Court’s role in disciplinary and reinstatement proceedings, governs access to State Bar Court records, and sets rules for proceedings and the adoption of standards, with limitations on the court’s authority to adopt rules of professional conduct or procedure, while granting the Executive Committee some authority to adopt practice rules.

Together, the provisions situate the bill within a broader policy context of governance transparency, exam integrity, and financial and programmatic accountability within California’s State Bar framework. The authors outline transitional and cross-reference updates, the deletion of obsolete provisions, and restructured distributions of affinity-program revenues as part of aligning state oversight with evolving organizational arrangements, including coordination with law schools, appraisal of AI usage, and the potential reallocation of affinity-program administration depending on jurisdictional alignment among the involved associations. The overall approach emphasizes mechanism-level changes to governance, funding flows, and compliance reporting, with timelines and conditionalities that interact with existing statutes and regulations governing the State Bar and its affiliated entities.