Legal Samaritan Is Now on Right Side of Law : Rescue: North Hollywood lawyer John Leslie, who gave first aid to a fellow test-taker, is honored by the Red Cross.

John Leslie is on the right side of the law now--or, at least, the State Bar Assn.

The 30-year-old North Hollywood man is a practicing attorney but his budding legal career looked in doubt a year ago, when the Bar denied Leslie and four others extra time on the grueling Bar exam after they stopped to administer first aid to another test-taker who suffered an epileptic seizure.

Eventually, amid national attention, the Bar relented and took into account the disruption. As a result, Leslie and a fellow Good Samaritan passed.

On Friday, Leslie was honored by the American Red Cross for his part in reviving the stricken test-taker by using the cardiopulmonary resuscitation techniques he learned from the Red Cross as a teen-ager.

Rep. Howard L. Berman, himself a certified attorney, congratulated Leslie for jumping to the epilepsy victim’s rescue instead of carrying on with the exam. About 500 others apparently ignored the man’s predicament.

“There’s a message for humanity. Who knows what anyone would’ve done in that situation?” said Berman (D-Panorama City). “I took the Bar exam. It’s perhaps the most traumatic episode you can go through in your life. Every pressure imaginable is on you. You’re thinking about your own performance.”

Berman presented Leslie with a Red Cross Certificate of Merit signed by President Clinton. The award is the latest accolade in the recognition Leslie has received, including an appearance soon after the exam on the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno”--a far less nerve-racking event, Leslie said, than Friday’s brief ceremony at the Van Nuys office of the Red Cross.

“It was a lot less stressful there. You’re just sittin’ around, shootin’ the breeze,” Leslie said. “Here it’s hard to stand with your knees locked.”

Last year’s Bar exam at the Pasadena Convention Center was Leslie’s second attempt at passing the intense three-day test. It was also the second time he’d used the CPR techniques he learned when he was 15 years old during lifeguard training in New York. (The first was on a neighbor who suffered a heart attack.)

The Pasadena incident spawned a fresh round of lawyer jokes and public snickers. Asked Friday whether he didn’t mind being associated with a profession that nearly denied him membership on what others saw as a heartless technicality, Leslie was diplomatic.

“Ultimately the Bar handled the situation in a fair way,” he said. “A lot of the reputation for the legal profession has been deserved in the past. . . . But it’s turning around.”

At the moment, the saxophonist-turned-Whittier Law School graduate works out of his North Hollywood apartment and in Montebello with another attorney. Although entertainment law once beckoned, criminal law now seems the ticket.

And he’s still getting calls from folks who remember his story from its telling and retelling in the press.

“People have actually cut out the article,” Leslie said, “and stuck it on their wall, and they say, ‘Someday when I need a lawyer. . . .’ ”