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Less than 24 hours before he was to be sworn in as a new lawyer in Nebraska, Matt Aksamit received a devastating phone call.

It was the equivalent of standing underneath a piano as it falls from the sky.

There was Matt on Wednesday afternoon, at the Omaha company where he was about to be promoted from law clerk to lawyer — he’d gotten the official offer that morning — and there was the very apologetic voice at the other end of the line. The voice was saying something about a clerical error with some bar exam scores. The voice was saying that Matt didn’t pass after all, that he’d missed the cutoff by three points. The voice was telling Matt not to come to Lincoln on Thursday.

He would not be sworn in with some 100 other would-be lawyers. He would not, at least for now, be an attorney.

Two other would-be lawyers got a phone call like that on Wednesday. And three others got very different phone calls — telling them that they had passed the bar exam after all and were invited to the State Capitol to be sworn in as lawyers.

In what is being described as a rare but unfortunate mistake, the Nebraska State Bar Commission had incorrect test scores for 11 of 171 test-takers who took the most recent test in July. The error came to light this week.