UPDATE: The State Bar confirmed the data breach was due to a glitch in Tyler Technologies Odyssey case management system. The data was made public due to the unique way that judyrecords gathered public records.
“We have confirmed that this was not a hack, but rather an access vulnerability problem with our Odyssey system. We thank judyrecords for quickly removing the files and look forward to similarly working expeditiously with Tyler Technologies to take the necessary steps to address this issue,” said Leah Wilson, State Bar executive director.
Judyrecords disabled its search function March 1.
San Bernardino Superior Court’s information was also not breached, Julie Van Hook, San Bernardino Superior Court’s public information officer, confirmed.
(end of update)
A judicial aggregation website released limited information about 260,000 State Bar disciplinary cases, making some information public in violation of state law, the State Bar claimed over the weekend.
The aggregator website that republished the records, judyrecords, said the documents were already publicly available off of the State Bar’s website, and only numbered 1,000.
The State Bar has since shut down the portal.
Both the bar and judyrecords have said that all State Bar disciplinary case information has since been removed.
The State Bar’s Feb. 26 statement said that the case number, file date, case type, case status, respondent and complaining witness names for 260,000 State Bar attorney discipline records were posted on juryrecords. Full case records were not published. Confidential court records from other jurisdictions were also released, the State Bar said.
Riverside Superior Court is not aware of any data being exposed, said Marita Ford, Riverside Superior Court chief deputy of finance and human resources/public information officer.
Tyler Technologies, the software vendor that runs the State Bar’s online portal, also serves San Bernardino Superior Court. The State Bar has directed the vendor to investigate the data breach.
The publication violates California Business and Professions Code 6086.1(b), which says all disciplinary investigations are confidential until formal charges are filed, the bar says.
judyrecords
An administrator’s note on judyrecords said the 1,000 documents were already publicly available on a State Bar page which the bar has since shut down.
The administrator was not contacted by the State Bar, and only learned about the breach after reading a news article based on the State Bar’s press release, the note says.
The administrator removed the disciplinary records after seeing the press release, and then reached out to the Bar Feb. 26, the note says. The Bar responded Feb. 27, and the parties are meeting to discuss the issue.
The open document website judyrecords holds 637.4 million cases, and claims to be the largest search engine of United States court cases on the internet.
Richard Barosky created the site as a public records idea in 2014, according to a YouTube video he posted in October, 2020.
Barosky’s Reddit account, which posted the video of the code development, has been actively commenting about judyrecords’ technical development for the past two years.
