UCLA Law Accidentally Emails Confidential On-Campus Interview Data to Students

The University of California, Los Angeles School of Law inadvertently released confidential information regarding on-campus interviews to students in an email June 3.

On Wednesday afternoon, Reddit user liberte_legalite posted: “My school (T20) accidentally sent out all of the rising 3Ls GPAs, OCI interviews/offers/rejections, and who tried to transfer.”

“They gave the 1L class a spreadsheet for OCI that was meant to be anonymized information for about a hundred firms,” they said, showing a chart with fake data.

The data released included law firm names, the GPA range of those interviewed and average offers.

Additionally, a spreadsheet contained student names along with their GPAs, the firms with which each student interviewed and the interview results.

Further, there was data with student names, GPA, transfer application and whether accepted/attending.

While the initial post did not name the school, a few Reddit users quickly identified it as being UCLA Law.

On Wednesday night, a UCLA spokesperson confirmed the incident.

UCLA released the following statement to Law.com on Wednesday evening: “Our career services staff recently shared information with our rising 2L students to help them prepare for interviews. Unfortunately, this information included a spreadsheet that contained hidden tabs that should have been removed.”

“Those tabs contained some rising 3L students’ 1L GPAs, along with firms from whom they had callbacks or offers,” according to the statement. “This accidental disclosure was a meaningful breach of confidentiality, and we feel terrible about it.”

“Once the error was discovered, the confidential information was removed immediately,” the statement continued. “We are working closely with the university’s Office of Records and Registration to follow all university rules and federal laws, and to address what happened in order to ensure that no such thing happens again.”

The statement concluded with: “We have apologized to the students affected and are working to address their concerns about this matter.”

Reddit user liberte_legalite said Wednesday that “[l]ast night, four days after distributing the spreadsheet, they asked all 1Ls to delete it if they had downloaded it.”

User falawlawlawlaw, replied, “We go to the same school. I was floored. And at the end of the email they just say basically ‘if you saw this, pretend you didn’t.’”

“Yeah this is pretty bad,” user EndCogNeeto added. “Some students might not care much but for others this could be a super sensitive issue. Not sure Oops cuts it.”

User 420_US_50-69_1975 posted what they identified as the email from UCLA that students received Tuesday, which stated:

“Late last week, the Career Services Office’s MyLaw page for OCI was updated with a spreadsheet for the Class of 2024 to view anonymized information about law firm hiring trends as they correlate to student GPAs and the Class of 2023.”

“Through an error, the spreadsheet with this information briefly contained hidden tabs,” according to the email.

Further, the email stated, “The inclusion of this information on separate tabs was a significant breach of confidentiality. On behalf of the Career Services Office, I wish to apologize profusely for this error.”

User 420_US_50-69_1975 did not include the administrator’s name who sent the email.

UCLA School of Law communications director Chris Roberts said in an email to Law.com, “I confirm that the email below looks to me like the one sent by an administrator yesterday.”

He added that he didn’t read it closely to “ensure that no tampering or editing has been made, but I can say that it looks correct to me on a quick read.”

Meanwhile, the debate continues about how the school should proceed.

“In the attention-based economy we live in, at a school-level this will be long forgotten,” Mike Spivey, Law School Admission counselor, told Law.com on Wednesday. “But on the individual level, students could have this come back to haunt them.”

“The school needs to do a lot more,” he said, suggesting UCLA talk one-on-one to the individual students affected by the breach about how this happened and how to mitigate the potential future implications of the incident.