A class action suit against the California State Bar due to a failure to protect confidential attorney investigation information was partially dismissed April 3.
Confidential documents from bar investigations were posted publicly by the judicial records site judyrecords until February 2022, when the site operator temporarily closed down the website after hearing that 322,525 of his hosted documents were confidential.
Follow Our Courts has reached out to the plaintiff’s lawyers for comment. The State Bar declined to comment on the case.
Findings
The presiding judge found that the federal antitrust claims fail because the State Bar is immune to antitrust law.
The judge also said the remaining claims might be better heard in state court, but has not yet made an official ruling on them.
The operator, identified in court records as Kevan Schwitzer, claimed Tyler Technologies failed to authenticate that people had access to the confidential information before providing them. The complaint echoes his claim. Schwitzer had found the confidential information by accidentally scraping them as part of its data collection practices, he claimed.
Tyler Technologies also provides technology services to San Bernardino Superior Court.
Lawsuits
Five anonymous plaintiffs sued the State Bar and judyrecords in Orange Superior Court March 18, 2022:
- An Orange County man who complained about an attorney who represented him
- A college student who complained against an attorney as part of a campaign, but later regretted it
- A San Diego lawyer who was investigated for a medical condition
- A Contra Costa lawyer whose family member filed a complaint against her during a probate dispute
- And a Los Angeles consumer attorney who filed a claim against another attorney.
Since the breach, the college student’s identity was stolen, resulting in a loss of money.
The case was moved to the California Central District Court May 13, 2022.
The plaintiffs settled with Schwitzer by May 20, 2022, but brought him back as a defendant later. He filed a declaration Aug. 6, 2022 claiming that Tyler Technologies continued to violate the Information Practices Act.
The complaint
The plaintiffs’ second amended complaint, filed Oct. 10, 2022, brought one count of violation of the California Information Practices Act of 1977, two counts of violation of privacy, two counts of antitrust violation and two counts of negligence. It named the State Bar, Tyler Technologies, interim director of information technology at the State Bar Rick Rankin and Schwitzer as defendants.
The complaint says the State Bar did not try to contact judyrecords when it learned of the breach, and that it lied to the public when they said they contacted law enforcement. Schwitzer also brought those claims against the Bar.
The State Bar failed to tell individuals if their records were breached as required by the Information Practices Act, the complaint argued.
The complaint also claimed the State Bar and Tyler Technologies violated antitrust law by conspiring to confuse the public about the damage of the data breach, and the State Bar violated antitrust law based on their disciplinary costs.
The dismissal
The plaintiff’s antitrust cases fail because the State Bar is immune from antitrust liability due to its subjugation to the California Supreme Court, California Central District Judge Douglas McCormick found.
“(F)ederal courts have routinely rejected attempts to bring a Sherman Act cause of action against the disciplinary rules of a state bar or a state Supreme Court,” McCormick wrote.
McCormick also found that the plaintiffs did not provide a basis from which any collusion between Tyler Technologies and the State Bar to confuse the public about the breach could be inferred.
Because McCormick dismissed the federal antitrust claims, he found that the federal court had no jurisdiction hearing the remaining claims, and he dismissed them as well.
“The state-law claims involve issues that are best addressed by the California state courts,” McCormick wrote.
Case information
Lenore Albert of Laguna Beach represented the plaintiffs.
California Central District Judge Douglas McCormick presided.
Read the second amended complaint here.
Read the order dismissing the antitrust claims here.
Case No. 8:22-cv-00983
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