California Bar Exposes Court Records

California court records

According to the State Bar of California, about 260,000 “nonpublic State Bar attorney discipline case records” and “confidential court records from other jurisdictions” were published online. A security flaw in the Odyssey case management system, from Tyler Technologies Inc., appears to have published the cases on judyrecords.com, a case aggregator and search engine. The published material includes information from sealed cases with juvenile defendants, as well as confidential attorney discipline case data.

Tyler Technologies, a public company based in Plano, Texas, has provided integrated software and technology services to public sector clients since 1997. According to its website, Odyssey has court and agency clients in 28 states. The California Bar initially suggested that the data was released by hackers. Their revised statement indicated that an “access vulnerability problem” in the Odyssey portal was responsible. The California Bar has indicated that confidential information from other jurisdictions was also revealed.

Judyrecords.com calls itself “a 100% free nationwide search engine that lets you instantly search hundreds of millions of United States court cases and lawsuits.” Run anonymously, its collection of cases is far larger than those of PACER or Google Scholar. According to Law360, judyrecords.com revealed detailed information about thousands of minors, including names, dates of birth, criminal charges, and sentencing information. In most states, this information would be private or access would be limited.

California Business and Professions Code 6086.1(b) treats disciplinary investigations as confidential until formal charges are filed. In violation of this rule, California displayed hundreds of thousands of records at The State Bar of California. Though full case records were not revealed, confidential documents were published, including case number, type, status, file date, respondents, and complaining witnesses.

Though Judyrecords.com obtained the records from a publicly available web page, the site removed them on request. Subsequently, “out of an abundance of caution,” judyrecords.com disabled its search function and eliminated direct access to all cases from the Odyssey system.

State Bar of California Addresses Breach of Confidential Data

Data Breach Updates

JudyRecords Document

Tyler Technologies Product Page