Earlier this week, the Rhode Island Supreme Court announced that seventeen attorneys are now eligible for the Rhode Island bar by petitioning for admission through the Uniform Bar Exam. Under the Court’s new bar exam policy, and combining the list of 28 attorneys who are eligible for the Rhode Island bar the old fashioned way by sitting for the February 2019 Rhode Island Bar Exam, this means 45 attorneys became eligible for the Rhode Island bar during the February-July 2019 cycle.
As RICourtBlog has previously reported, the number of new attorneys admitted in Rhode Island has declined over the past few years because budding lawyers had to choose between taking the Rhode Island Bar Exam or the Uniform Bar Exam, and apparently more chose the Uniform Bar Exam because it made them eligible to practice in more jurisdictions. Only 36 became eligible for the Rhode Island Bar after the February 2018 bar exam, and only 35 after the July 2018 exam, for a total of 71 new attorneys in 2018.
These statistics are way below historical numbers. In 2008, for example, 214 new attorneys passed the Rhode Island bar. Rhode Island’s numbers have followed a gradual downward trajectory in recent years; it had 176 new attorneys in 2013, 163 in 2014, 135 in 2015, and 104 in 2016.
It will be interesting if these numbers now tick back up through petitions using the Uniform Bar Exam. Rhode Island has received 28 applications since it began accepting the Uniform Bar Exam for the first time on February 28, 2019. The current roster of 17 new attorneys eligible for admission through the Uniform Bar Exam at a swearing-in ceremony on August 14, 2019 consists of attorneys who filed their applications between February 28, 2019 and June 21, 2019, completed their petitions by July 31, 2019, and who were approved by the Board of Bar Examiners. Attorneys who applied using the Uniform Bar Exam after June 21, 2019, will be processed on a rolling basis, and the admission timeline for those petitions has yet to be determined.
So far, it appears that concerns over administrative burden from large numbers of Uniform Bar Exam applications to the Rhode Island Bar have not come to fruition. As Judge Selya (and Shakespeare) like to say, “[i]t is said that past is prologue,” United States v. Vargas-Davila, 649 F.3d 129, 131 (1st Cir. 2011); Fisher v. Kadant, Inc., 589 F.3d 505, 509 (1st Cir. 2009); United States v. Stoller, 78 F.3d 710, 723 (1st Cir. 1996); United States v. Tortora, 922 F.2d 880, 887 (1st Cir. 1990), but this old adage will probably not hold true for the number of petitioners to the Rhode Island Bar. More likely, the low number of Uniform Bar Exam petitions from February to July 2019 is prologue to a future floodgate, as the new policy ramps up and more attorneys become aware of it.