Money & the Law: Would-be attorneys face character and fitness assessment

Last week, I told you about one of the speed bumps in the path of getting a license to practice law in Colorado — the bar examination.

The bar examination is an intense, two-day, three-part test, given twice a year (February and July) intended to assess an applicant’s knowledge of legal rules and an applicant’s aptitude for analysis, problem solving, and client counseling. In the latest exam, in July, the pass rate was 80%, meaning 20% of the applicants (147) failed.

Another hurdle to a law license in Colorado (and other states) is a character and fitness assessment. In Colorado, this is carried out for each law license applicant by the Office of Attorney Admissions, an agency of the Colorado Supreme Court. An applicant for a license to practice law in Colorado has the burden of demonstrating to this agency that he or she is of “good moral character” and is “fit to practice law.” The stated purpose of this requirement is to “safeguard and protect the public.”

The character and fitness assessment begins with a long and detailed application, which requires the applicant to disclose all manner of skeletons that might be in the closet. This includes employment terminations, defaulted debts, bankruptcies, criminal actions, civil lawsuits, income tax delinquencies, government agency sanctions, educational institution sanctions, child support delinquencies, drug and alcohol problems, and even traffic law violations. Applicants are also fingerprinted and the prints are run through the databases of whatever government agencies compile bad person information.

Everything is then reviewed by the Office of Attorney Admissions, which can drill down on anything in the application that triggers its curiosity.

If issues surface during this review, an investigator can be engaged. The investigator can look under any and all rocks, including interviewing references coming from the applicant and other people who know the applicant. Applicants are asked to provide whatever they can come up with as evidence of remediation of character and fitness black marks.

The character and fitness assessment can also include a meeting at which a panel consisting of investigators, analysts and others involved in the regulation of the legal profession get together and make a decision about an applicant’s status.

The Office of Attorney Admissions says its character and fitness procedures (which look much like a government security clearance screening) constitute a “thorough and holistic” review of the character and fitness of applicants for a license to practice law in Colorado.

In order to continue with the application for a license to practice law, including taking the bar exam, the Office of Attorney Admissions must certify to the Supreme Court that an applicant meets the character and fitness standards developed by the Supreme Court and set forth in detail in the Colorado Rules of Civil Procedure.

If the Office of Attorney Admissions decides it cannot make this certification, the applicant is entitled to a hearing before a hearing board consisting of a key player in matters of lawyer discipline called the “presiding disciplinary judge” and two members of something called the “character and fitness committee.” After the hearing, the hearing board prepares written findings of fact and conclusions of law, and sends the matter upstream to the Supreme Court for a final decision. If the Supreme Court denies the application, the applicant can try again — in five years.

Once a law license is issued, lawyers are required to comply with another detailed set of rules called the Rules of Professional Conduct. A violation of those rules can lead to various sanctions, including disbarment.

Pre-licensing character and fitness assessments are obviously not foolproof predictors of good future conduct. But at least they keep some bad apples out of the legal profession and send them off in other directions to cause mischief.