The February 2025 California Bar Exam was in the news for a lot of the wrong reasons. My upcoming piece in the International Jurist is a more general piece about foreign lawyers and the California Bar Exam. Though I did speak with two foreign lawyers who were very happy/relieved to find out they passed.

Two Routes for Foreign Takers

California offers two main paths for foreign takers. Very broadly, you can qualify as a foreign attorney with no LL.M. needed or you can qualify as a foreign-educated law grad with some U.S. legal education needed. Their website does a better job than I can:

California Bar Exams Stats

One of the neat things about the California Bar Exam statistics is that they break out the pass rates for each test by categories. So you can see how both groups do, though there is some nuance even to those categories (e.g., foreign attorney who already qualifies but enrolls in an LL.M. program!).

If you look at the February 2024 exam statistics, you can see that the foreign attorney category had a 23.6% overall pass rate and the foreign-educated + U.S. legal studies category had a 19.3% pass rates.

Recent Pass Rates for Both Groups

Over the last four exams, you can see the pass rates in the table below. Information taken from the Statistics page. There is also some nuance to the July v. February statistics and the first-time v. repeater statistics. But for this post, I won’t cover those discussions.

Something I cover a little in my International Jurist piece: California’s reputation as the “hardest” bar exam (to pass) but the “easiest” bar exam (to qualify for). You can see that we’re generally looking at one-in-five to one-in-four foreign takers passing. Interestingly, the foreign attorneys tend to do slightly better than the foreign-educated + U.S.-educated. And finally, remember to also pay attention to the number of takers.

February 2025: What to Expect?

With the news referenced above, California’s February 2025 bar pass rate has been described as being a record high!

And so the question: despite the difficulties and issues February 2025 takers encountered, was it the best time for foreign takers to have taken the California Bar Exam to pass?

I believe the statistics take a while to be released, so we’ll just have to wait and see. My guess? Based on the overall numbers going up, I hope/expect to see the foreign categories both move up as well.

But how much? Similar to the J.D. rates? Better? Worse?

We will find out later this summer!