Office of Bar Counsel, 0617 WYBJ, Vol. 40 No. 3. 12

• Author: Mark W. Gifford, Wyoming State Bar Office of Bar Counsel Cheyenne, Wyoming

Office of Bar Counsel

Vol. 40 No. 3 Pg. 12

Wyoming Bar Journal

June, 2017

Testing and Screening of Applicants for Admission: A Look Behind the Scenes

Mark W. Gifford, Wyoming State Bar Office of Bar Counsel Cheyenne, Wyoming

In Wyoming, regulation of the practice of law by lawyers is a deeply imbedded tradition. Its roots can be traced to the century before last, when the Wyoming Legislature created the Board of Law Examiners (BLE) in 1899. For much of the twentieth century, the BLE, a group of five Court-appointed lawyers, was charged not only with testing and screening applicants for admission to the Wyoming State Bar, but with investigating and taking appropriate action with respect to ethical complaints against members of the Bar.^[1] For most of that time, the Board operated without staff support because until 1977, the Wyoming State Bar had no paid employees.

As the practice of law has evolved, the process of screening, testing and admitting applicants has by necessity become more professionalized. In Wyoming, the admissions function has come a long way from how it functioned for most of the last century. Until the late 1970s, the process was vested entirely in the BLE, whose members wrote and graded the Bar exam twice each year. In 1972, the BLE added the Multistate Bar Examination, a multiple choice examination prepared by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE), to what had always been a homemade, all-essay exam. The Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination was added in 1981.

This three-part testing method remained in place until 2012, when Chief Justice Marilyn Kite led the push for adoption of the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE). In late 2012, Wyoming became the 11^th UBE state. There are presently 27-soon to be 28.The UBE represents a quantum leap forward in assuring examination of applicants through a meticulously-developed, thoroughly-vetted testing mechanism. Members of the BLE attend regular training in Madison, Wisconsin (headquarters of the NCBE), where, under the tutelage of trained examiners/exam writers, they hone the skills necessary to insure that grades given on written portions of the exam^[2] are fair and consistent.

Equally significant strides have been made in the screening of applicants for character and fitness to practice law. As recently as 1992, the Wyoming Supreme Court's screening rule simply required the BLE "to make independent...