In a ruling that promises to fundamentally alter the way many American law students prepare for the bar exam, a federal judge has ruled concluded that a California company illegally copied questions from the Multistate Bar Examination for use in its bar exam preparation courses and ordered it to pay more than $11.9 million to the National Conference of Bar Examiners.
In the suit, NCBE claimed that employees of Multistate Legal Studies Inc. have attended bar exams in several states for the sole purpose of copying questions to be used in its prep courses.
MLSI is based in Santa Monica, Calif., and has offices in Philadelphia and New York. It operates bar review programs under the trade name PMBR, which stands for “preliminary multistate bar review.”
Lawyers for MLSI insisted that any similarities between the questions in their prep courses and those on the MBE stem from the fact that both are drawn from the same pool of material -- hornbooks, law treatises and case law -- and that such similarity is entirely permissible.
But Senior U.S. District Judge John P. Fullam disagreed and said the evidence showed MLSI had copied both the detailed facts in the questions as well as the correct and incorrect answers.
Details here from The Legal Intelligencer via Law.com. (HT to Bashman)