Law-school grads are averse to working outside of cities. The state bar association wants to fix that.
A state bar association has launched a training academy to address workforce challenges in rural areas.
In late January, the Indiana State Bar Association (ISBA) announced the creation of its Rural Practice Academy, a yearlong program designed to encourage lawyers to pursue work in counties that have been identified as underserved “legal deserts”—counties with less than one attorney per 1,000 people.
ISBA Executive Director Joe Skeel, CAE, said the legal profession is facing similar challenges to accounting, healthcare, and other areas where the workforce supply isn’t meeting demand. “We talk to leaders of those associations in our state, and they’re all feeling the same thing: Anything that requires somebody to go away to college for a four-year degree, those kids just aren’t going back,” he said. In Indiana, more than half of the state’s 92 counties qualify as legal deserts, a problem exacerbated by the recent closures of law schools at Indiana Tech University and Valparaiso University.
The Rural Practice Academy was one product of a larger task force dedicated to workforce challenges convened by ISBA in early 2024. But the true genesis involves post-pandemic conversations with the Indiana Supreme Court, which was exploring various changes to the profession to close workforce gaps. For instance, the court has discussed changes to licensure requirements and permitting private ownership of law firms.
More than half of Indiana’s 92 counties qualify as legal deserts.
Not all of those proposals were palatable to ISBA membership, Skeel said, so it made a point of working with the court’s own committee while also developing its own solutions that would satisfy both the court and ISBA membership. “We worked in parallel with them, tackling these issues, to come up with our own ideas and solutions,” he said. “But we also wanted to learn and understand, what are the no-gos for our members? What are the absolutes that we’re not willing to budge on?”
In early 2025, ISBA released an Attorney Shortage Plan, with three pillars, the first of which is closing the rural workforce gap. The Rural Practice Academy is the centerpiece of that effort, and though it’s modeled after a leadership development program the association has been running for years, the new program has required a shift in resources, Skeel said. He created an associate executive director position to manage the workload while ISBA begins implementing the shortage plan.
In its first year, the Rural Practice Academy will limit its cohort to around 25 participants. But Skeel said that even a cohort as small as five can make a substantial difference in addressing a stubborn problem.
“If a county in Indiana adds one lawyer, then the number of people that they can help and serve and represent in their county—it can actually be one lawyer that takes them off of the legal desert list,” he said. “They might become the only family law attorney in that county, which now allows somebody in that county to handle divorces, child visitations, and things like that. So even if the numbers seem low in terms of attendees, if you take five counties off of the legal desert list out of 92, that’s a massive impact to those communities themselves.”
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