Firms provide talent incentives; experts consider alternative pathways in underserved areas
Many baby boomer generation attorneys are in the closing arguments of their careers.
But during a statewide drawdown in the profession, Michigan City’s Stefan May just made his entrance.
Recently graduated from the Purdue Global Law School, May joined Crown Point’s Robbins and Seville law firm as an associate attorney this summer.
“I have a full caseload of clients, and I love practicing in Indiana,” he said. “It’s the right time to do it, because there is a lawyer shortage.”
Indiana ranks in the bottom 10 states nationally with only 2.3 attorneys per 1,000 residents and over half of its counties qualify as legal deserts, according to the American Bar Association.
The Indiana Supreme Court is considering reforms to meet the growing demand for affordable legal assistance. It already approved an amendment in 2024 that allows online law school graduates like May to take the bar exam if they submit a waiver.
That decision is good news for the Region’s law firms, which make recruiting and retaining fresh talent a priority.
Joshua Hague, a partner at Krieg DeVault, said his firm offers summer interns more than $2,500 a week and new associate attorneys $150,000 a year. But he said those paychecks represent the normal course of inflation and are not a response to a labor market shortfall.
Shelice Tolbert, a partner at Tolbert & Tolbert in Gary, said another hiring trend is developing.
“The request to work remotely seems to be more common and expected in attracting new hires,” she said. Her firm hired a new attorney in 2025.
Firms are counting on perks like these to replace the roughly 200 names that have dropped off the official count of active practitioners across Lake, Porter, La Porte, St. Joseph and Elkhart counties since 2020.
Other firms find support services a key to addressing the growing demand for counsel in Indiana.
“As demand for legal services continues to grow statewide, we expect that model — pairing our attorneys with skilled allied professionals — to keep playing a role in how we scale to meet it,” said Timothy Emerick, managing partner in Barnes & Thornburg’s South Bend office.
Legal deserts
Indiana faces another legal problem: legal deserts. Newton, Jasper, Starke and Pulaski counties are among the 49 rural Indiana counties with fewer than one lawyer per 1,000 residents, the American Bar Association’s threshold for a legal desert.
Tolbert would argue that areas of Gary also fit that definition.
“We have some outstanding attorneys in Gary and communities like Gary, but there are also gaps in practice areas because those attorneys do not handle every area of the law, which leads to citizens going outside of their own community to find a lawyer,” she said. “That indicates a need for more lawyers in Gary.”
The shortage has been most keenly felt in the Region since declining enrollment forced the 2020 closure of Valparaiso University’s law school, once accounting for 20% of the state’s law school graduates.
Hague said the closure impacted Krieg DeVault, which opened its Crown Point office in 2025. It also has a Mishawaka location.
“You could recruit (Valparaiso) graduates with a high chance they would stay with the Region,” Hague said. “Now, we fish for talent a little farther out in the pond.”
Tolbert said that closure also is affecting their ability to build a talent pipeline.
“We look to our bar associations that have law student memberships and the local universities with prelaw programs,” she said. “We know that students who attend IU in Indianapolis or Bloomington most likely have Northwest Indiana roots and could be looking to come back to the area to work. We also explore some of the law schools in the Chicagoland area with the same thought of NWI ties.”
Another training ground, the Indiana Tech Law School in Fort Wayne, folded three years before Valparaiso University’s law school, and only graduated two classes.
Notre Dame Law School near South Bend and Indiana University’s two schools of law (McKinney in Indianapolis and Maurer in Bloomington) remain prestigious training grounds. But fewer than half of their annual classes, of about 600, take the bar exam, a rigorous two-day test that applicants must pass to be licensed to practice in the Hoosier state.
Joe Skeel, executive director of the Indiana State Bar Association, said that, when law students go away to college, they don’t return home like they used to.
“It’s easier to find a job in a metro area,” he said. “There are just more law firms, clients and opportunity.”
But for Tolbert and her husband, Michael Tolbert, staying in the Region is a priority. They plan to attract new talent especially in underserved areas. They also are looking for a new office.
“In our quest for new space, we plan to stay in the community that raised us,” Shelice Tolbert said. “As far as future growth goes, we hope to provide legal services for other communities like Gary.”
New route to bar exam
Getting an invitation to the bar exam room was once almost exclusively available to degree holders from the ivy halls of traditional brick-and-mortar law schools.
To address the decline in the number of lawyers, the Indiana Supreme Court opened the door to fully online law schools in 2024.
That includes Purdue Global, which was founded in California in 1998 as Concord Law School. In 2018, it began operating under West Lafayette’s Purdue University banner.
Of the 16 Indiana-based Purdue Global Law School graduates last year, 11, including May, passed the bar.
Now, more than 140 Indiana students are studying law online at Purdue Global, a 900% increase.
Born in Merrillville, May’s family moved from Indiana to Florida.
“I came back to Indiana, got my undergraduate degree, majoring in criminal justice,” he said. “I wanted to be a cop, but that didn’t work out.”
He was stuck in a security job in La Porte County when he made a farsighted decision at what then appeared to be an inopportune moment.
He pivoted to a law career, but the Valparaiso law school had already closed.
“The closest other law school was in the South Bend area, but I wouldn’t have been able to hold down a job and maintain a class schedule,” May said. “I would have had to choose between law school or raising a family.
“Purdue Global’s online platform was about the only option.”
He enrolled, putting aside the problem of circumventing Indiana’s online law school restrictions. Fortuitously, Indiana unlocked the bar exam door in time for May to pass it and look for a job.
Kim Kass, Purdue Global Law School director of employment and community outreach, helped May find his first job.
“Stefan was one of my first employment placements,” she said. “I had previously worked at the Valparaiso University Law School, and through those connections, I knew lawyers at Robbins and Seville who asked if I knew of anybody to recruit. Stefan interviewed and got hired.”
Second- and third-year Purdue Global students are landing internships and externships, building entry-level skills and receiving academic credits as judicial law clerks and volunteers who aid low-income Hoosiers.
“Law firms are eager to recruit our students,” Kass said.
Martin Pritikin, dean of the Purdue Global Law School, said this opens a new chapter for both his school and the state.
“Before, there was a lot of uncertainty outside the school as to whether our graduates could pass the Indiana bar exam,” he said. “Now our graduates are passing the bar exam at a higher rate than the statewide average. It proves online doesn’t mean inferior.”
That realization is an important one for the state of Indiana.
“The existing law schools, while all fine institutions, are confined by geography in their ability to serve certain parts of the state,” Pritikin said. “As an online school, we don’t have those limitations. Our students are drawn from those underserved areas. About one in eight come from Northwest Indiana.”
He said Purdue Global is also more affordable, especially since you don’t have to live on campus.
“IU McKinney’s tuition is about two times as much as ours,” he said. “Maurer is about 2.5 times as much, and Notre Dame is almost 4 times as much.”
Pritikin said Purdue Global is more accessible to the 70 percent of his students who must remain employed while studying remotely because they have to be the bread winners for their dependents at home.
Building pipeline
Emerick of Barnes & Thornburg said there is no talent deficit at his firm, which employs more than 900 lawyers in offices around the country.
“In fact, we’ve seen a recent surge of new lawyers bringing fresh energy, skills and contributions to our firm,” he said. “Last fall, we welcomed our largest-ever associate attorney class, including 11 in our Indiana offices.”
It helps that Notre Dame is close by his office.
“South Bend has been a big part of that story, as one of the largest law offices in Northern Indiana,” he said.
But, he attributes the firm’s recruiting success to much more than proximity.
“We’ve leaned into building a pipeline rather than just competing for lawyers already in the market,” he said. “We have an active summer associate program we use to recruit top talent from throughout the Region to join our team in South Bend.”
The law firm that was formed in 1982 also invests internally.
“We also have a robust talent recruiting team, including a top-tier in-house recruiter, dedicated to identifying and developing that talent early,” Emerick said.
Barnes & Thornburg’s undergraduate internship program for aspiring business professionals interested in a legal industry career is actively recruiting regional talent across Purdue, Butler and DePauw university campuses.
“It’s a 10-week summer program that gives students a real look at the business of law,” he said. “One of our interns, who just wrapped up, is starting law school at IU right now. The program is another way we’re building relationships with Indiana talent early.”
He said young lawyers are drawn to Barnes & Thornburg’s parental leave benefits, and the chance to work closely with seasoned litigators and dealmakers on complex, nationally significant matters, while living in a smaller market with a lower cost of living.
“That combination of substantive early-career experience and quality of life is a real differentiator for Northwest and North Central Indiana specifically,” Emerick said.
Legal service alternatives
The authors of the Commission on Indiana’s Legal Future final report concluded that the state must find not only more lawyers, but also better business models for rendering legal assistance.
The commission outlined a “legal regulatory sandbox” of nontraditional legal service methods.
William Henderson, an Indiana University Bloomington law professor, advocates the creation of nonprofit law firms employing allied legal professionals and technology to serve up high-volume, basic legal work — like fast-food outlets.
Henderson worked with the Commission on Indiana’s Legal Future and undergraduate IU law students to research the challenges of legal services in rural and depressed communities.
“We found virtually all the lawyers in Bloomington and adjacent rural counties swamped with work and struggling to recruit entry-level lawyers and professional staff,” he said.
That workload is why rural practices turn away volumes of low-value cases in high need areas such as family law, debt collection and consumer bankruptcy cases, he said.
“A nonprofit law firm could focus on volume and low cost, like the McDonald’s of law service, which is not a bad thing,” Henderson said.
“Let allied legal professionals focus on low-complexity, low-cost service under the supervision of lawyers. Then the lawyers would now be free to practice law at the top of their licenses.”
Shontrai Irving, clinical professor of business law at Purdue University Northwest, said resources already are available for people who don’t have legal counsel, including websites like Indiana Legal Help, the Lake County Bar Association and the Indiana State Bar Association.
Barnes & Thornburg uses paralegals and other allied legal professionals throughout its South Bend and Elkhart offices, Emerick said.
“It creates efficiencies and benefits for clients without sacrificing service or quality,” Emerick said. “That’s not a workaround for a shortage we’re not experiencing; it’s simply smart practice.”
Professionals without a law degree provide support services like client intake and case management.
“All of that work is reviewed by our lawyers, so clients get the benefit of a broader, more efficient team without any change in the quality or oversight of the legal advice they’re getting,” he said.
Cultivating rural practices
Kathryn Dolan, deputy chief for the Indiana Office of Judicial Administration, said state officials have yet to release money to fund law school scholarships or other incentives for lawyers to practice in rural areas. But she said the work to secure future funding continues.
Skeel of the Indiana State Bar Association said the state legislature passed a bill supporting scholarships to law students who agree to serve as a deputy prosecutor or public defender in rural communities.
“Everybody supports that idea, but there is no money backing that up,” Skeel said, “It’s really tough to start practicing in a rural community, unless you know someone, like a family member.”
Skeel said the state bar started a Rural Practice Academy this summer to train attorneys in the business of starting a solo or small law firm. About 15 attorneys around the state, including one from Mishawaka, have been taking part.
He also wants state bar association members to sit down with chambers of commerce and local nonprofit foundations of underserved communities to brainstorm ways to draw people in.
“The prime group to return to rural communities are the people who have been practicing law for enough years to be confident with their legal skills, they’ve figured out how to deal with their student debt, and they are ready to take that next step,” Skeel said. •
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