Who this affects

Arrest records and law licences

Checked 2026-08-25

Attorneys are the only group whose regulator is told about the arrest through two independent government channels before the lawyer decides anything — a fingerprint service built for the purpose, and the prosecutor.

Two channels, neither of them you

California B&P § 6054(d) provides that fingerprint records of admitted attorneys are retained by the Department of Justice for the limited purpose of criminal arrest notification to the State Bar. Rule of Court 9.9.5 required active attorneys to be re-fingerprinted by the end of 2019 specifically so the Bar would receive those notifications.

B&P § 6101(b) then requires the prosecuting agency to notify the Office of Chief Trial Counsel of the pendency of an action charging a felony or misdemeanour immediately upon obtaining information that the defendant is an attorney. The court clerk must transmit a certified record of conviction within 48 hours.

Your own duty sits on top: § 6068(o)(4) requires written report to the State Bar within 30 days of the bringing of an indictment or information charging a felony. Florida is faster — Rule 3-7.2(e) requires the document within ten days, and its definition of a determination of guilt expressly includes withheld adjudication and no-contest pleas.

Discipline does not wait for a conviction

ABA Model Rule 8.4(b) makes it misconduct to commit a criminal act reflecting adversely on honesty, trustworthiness or fitness. The act is the violation; the judgment is evidence of it, not the trigger. Rule 8.3(a) obliges other lawyers who know of a qualifying violation to report it.

For applicants the reach is wider still. The NCBE character report application asks whether, in the past ten years, you have been cited for, arrested or charged with any violation of law — and instructs you to include proceedings that were dismissed, sealed, expunged, referred to diversion or deferred prosecution, or otherwise set aside. An expungement does not answer that question for you.

Where a removal service is honest about its limits

Bar discipline records and State Bar Court filings are public by design and cannot be removed. Neither can the notification channels above — they are statutory plumbing.

What can be addressed is the commercial layer, and for lawyers it matters more than most: your practice depends on people searching your name and finding your firm rather than a booking photograph. Aggregator copies, the county roster, and news coverage of a case that was dropped are the removable surface. Attorneys are also the referral channel we work with most often, so if you are reading this for a client rather than yourself, the same distinctions apply.

If you are applying for admission, expungement changes nothing

This is the fact to plan around, and it surprises applicants every year. The national character report application asks whether you have been cited for, arrested, or charged with any violation of law within the past ten years — and expressly includes matters that were dismissed, sealed, expunged, referred to a diversion or deferred prosecution programme, or otherwise set aside. You are required to produce documentation, the expungement order among it.

So sealing the record does not remove the duty to disclose it. It changes what you attach to the disclosure. An applicant who reads an expungement as permission to answer no is creating a candour problem considerably worse than the original charge.

There is an asymmetry here worth naming. A California firm hiring you is barred from asking about or using an arrest that produced no conviction. The character and fitness process is bound by no such rule. The same record is off-limits to your future employer and squarely in scope for your admission.

Try the free route first

Google removes your home address, phone number, email and — since February 2026 — government ID numbers at no cost. More than 10 million people have used it. It does not cover arrest records, and it will not touch a government or newspaper page, but it is free and it is worth running first.

Open Google’s Results about you tool

Sources

• Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 6054
• Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 6101
• Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 6068
• State Bar of California — fingerprinting rule requirements
• Rule Regulating The Florida Bar 3-7.2
• NCBE — sample character report application
• ABA Model Rule 8.4
• Cal. Labor Code §432.7 — arrest records in employment

Every claim on this page traces to the sources above, checked on 2026-08-25. Rules in this area change — several of the ones on this page changed in the last three years. If you find something here that is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.