King County Public Defenders Office will ‘temporarily’ hold jobs after bar exam canceled, WA Supreme Court working to ‘identify avenues to resolution’

OLYMPIA – The King County Department of Public Defense will “temporarily” hold job offers for 26 recent law school graduates who were unable to take the bar exam this week after a technology failure made the test impossible to administer.

The department is also among those pushing the state Supreme Court to grant applicants diploma privilege, which would allow them to practice law without passing the exam. The court said in a statement to applicants on Thursday it is “working to obtain more information, examine options, and identify avenues to resolution.”

“We will communicate our plans moving forward as we make those decisions and are working to have a comprehensive response as soon as we can,” the court said.

Matthew James Sanders, director of the King County Department of Public Defense, wrote in a letter to state Supreme Court Justice Debra Stephens on Wednesday that while the department has assured candidates that their jobs will temporarily remain open, “every month that passes will cost each of these attorneys $8,606.02 in salary alone, not including health benefits or experience gained.”

“Therefore, having to wait to sit for the bar exam until September or even next February will impose significant costs on them,” Sanders wrote.

If the applicants are not granted their law license by October, when they were scheduled to begin their jobs, Sanders said they “will likely incur additional debt on top of their student loan obligations from law school and college, and therefore find themselves less able to pursue public defense as a career.”

Sanders added that applicants, like all new attorneys, would receive “intensive supervision from experienced supervising attorneys” and a reduced caseload to “ensure they provide competent and diligent representation.”

Mick Guile, who is among those hired as a public defender in King County, said Thursday they were “happy they gave us this assurance.”

“Obviously, ideally I would be able to start sooner, but I understand that it would be difficult to get everyone temporarily licensed to practice,” Guile said. “I honestly hadn’t even considered the fact that they might have revoked job offers, given the new caseload standards, so it just made sense to me that they would still be taking us on – just with a much different timeline.”

The Washington Bar Association announced Wednesday that it had canceled the exam after a technology issue made it impossible to administer to the 645 applicants registered to take it at the Yakima Convention Center.

The National Conference for Bar Examiners, which administered a new version of the test for the first time, attributed the problem to an “on-site hardware and configuration issue.”

Applicants and the deans of law schools at the University of Washington, Seattle University and Gonzaga University have asked the Washington Supreme Court to grant applicants diploma privilege.

On Thursday, the state Supreme Court said it has heard from applicants, law school deans, members of the WSBA board of governors, and others, “all of whom urge us to take swift action to rectify this situation.”

“We are actively engaged in fully understanding what happened and working with WSBA and the NCBE toward a timely solution,” the statement says.