Will Loosening Attorney-Licensure Requirements Cure Tennessee Legal Deserts?

There is an intuitive appeal to the idea that a shortage of lawyers can be cured by producing more of them. If too few attorneys practice in rural Tennessee, the natural remedy would seem to be widening the path into the profession—admitting more people, more quickly, and at lower cost. That logic now animates a formal inquiry by the Tennessee Supreme Court, which in September 2025 invited public comment on whether it should modify, reduce, or eliminate its reliance on accreditation by the American Bar Association in setting educational requirements, adopt alternative pathways to admission, and otherwise lower the barriers to entry into the Tennessee bar, with the stated goal of ensuring that all Tennesseans have access to affordable, quality legal services.¹

The access problem the Court describes is real, and it is unmistakably geographic. Tennessee's Department of Economic and Community Development classifies seventy-eight of the state's ninety-five counties as rural, home to roughly 2.6 million of its 6.9 million residents.² The American Bar Association, which in 2020 defined a "legal desert" as a community with fewer than one lawyer per thousand residents, reported that Tennessee has about 2.8 lawyers per thousand people statewide.³ That aggregate figure conceals the maldistribution beneath it. As of 2020, the state's five largest counties each counted more than a thousand attorneys—Davidson alone had over five thousand—while twenty counties had fewer than ten lawyers apiece.⁴ The lawyers exist. They are simply not where the need is greatest.

This is the difficulty with treating admission standards as the lever. A legal desert is not, at root, a credentialing problem. It is a problem of distribution—and the rules governing who may practice law say nothing about where that law will be practiced.

Begin with the most basic point. A newly admitted attorney, however she was trained and whatever pathway carried her to licensure, retains the discretion to open her practice wherever she chooses. Nothing in a relaxed admission standard directs her toward a county of nine lawyers rather than a city of five thousand. The concentration of attorneys in metropolitan centers reflects broad economic and demographic patterns—clients, institutions, and revenue cluster in population centers, and lawyers follow.⁵ One researcher who has mapped the shortage describes it as a brain drain operating across generations, the same gravitational pull that has thinned rural America of doctors, veterinarians, and other high-skill professionals.⁶ Lowering the threshold for admission does not alter that calculus. It enlarges the pool from which lawyers are drawn without changing the forces that decide where they settle.

Nor does a larger bar necessarily mean cheaper legal services. The fees a lawyer charges are driven only partly by the cost of her education; they are driven at least as much by the ordinary cost of running a practice—office space, malpractice coverage, legal-research subscriptions, staff, and taxes.⁵ None of those costs falls because the path to licensure has been shortened. A reform that expands the supply of credentials without touching the underlying economics of practice may produce more lawyers who are no more able to serve clients of modest means. Scholars have long observed that professional-control rules raise the cost of legal services, but it does not follow that relaxing one such rule—the educational threshold—meaningfully lowers that cost.⁷

The empirical record complicates the intuition further, and in a way that should give reformers pause. The premise behind most recruitment and loan-forgiveness programs is that rural practice is financially unattractive—that lawyers avoid the countryside because it pays less. The data do not bear this out. A recent study classifying the nation's non-metropolitan counties by the severity of their lawyer shortage found that attorneys in the most acute "critical" deserts earn about the same as lawyers in other rural counties; the wage differential that incentive programs are designed to close is, in fact, slim.⁸ The same research reframes the legal desert not as a single condition but as a continuum—emerging, urgent, and critical—and characterizes the hardest-hit communities as distant, disconnected, diverse, and disadvantaged.⁸ Their barriers are structural: great distances, thin broadband, populations with limited English proficiency, and clients whose poverty makes even modest fees unpayable.⁸ These are not obstacles that a different bar-admission rule can reach.

And even if more lawyers did settle in underserved counties, more lawyers would not guarantee the right kind of help. The romantic image of the rural generalist—the country lawyer who handles a little of everything for everyone—does not survive contact with the evidence. A recent mixed-methods study of rural private practice found that attorneys who describe themselves as generalists often, on closer inspection, devote the overwhelming share of their work to a single profitable area such as real estate, leaving family law, probate, and criminal defense underserved even where a lawyer is nominally present.⁹ Counting heads, in other words, tells you little about what those heads are actually doing. A county with one lawyer is not served if that lawyer does only closings.

All of this points toward a more demanding conception of the problem. More than a decade ago, two scholars distinguished a "thin" idea of access to justice—can a person find a lawyer and navigate a court—from a "thick" one that attends to the systemic conditions producing legal need in the first place.¹⁰ Legal deserts are a thick problem. They are entangled with rural poverty, demographic decline, and the erosion of the institutions that once anchored small communities.¹¹ Admission reform operates on the thin margin. It can, at most, increase the number of credentials in circulation; it cannot redistribute them, lower the cost of practice, or ensure that the practice that emerges matches the need that exists.

None of this means the Court's inquiry is misdirected. There is a credible case that some admission-adjacent reforms would help—streamlining comity admission for out-of-state attorneys, for instance, particularly given that many of Tennessee's rural communities sit within reach of metropolitan legal centers.⁵¹² But the reforms most likely to reach the driest counties are the ones aimed directly at distribution and cost rather than at the credential. They include targeting any subsidy to the practice areas of genuine need rather than to lawyers generally;⁹ authorizing trained, supervised non-lawyers—licensed paraprofessionals or community justice workers—to handle routine civil matters in the places where people already seek help;⁸¹³ and confronting the unmet need the state's own data document, where most low-income Tennesseans receive no meaningful help with the housing, family, and benefits problems that dominate their lives.¹⁴ These are interventions in the economics and geography of legal need, not in the gate.

There is also a risk worth naming. Relaxing substantive standards is not merely insufficient; pursued carelessly, it can do harm. The Tennessee District Public Defenders Conference has warned that lowering the bar to admission could produce a two-tiered profession in which well-resourced clients retain experienced counsel while the indigent are defended by those admitted under lighter standards—an outcome with serious equal-protection and effective-assistance implications.⁵ A reform sold as expanding access could, at the margins, degrade the quality of the representation that the most vulnerable already struggle to obtain.

The deeper lesson is one about diagnosis. A desert is defined not by the absence of seeds but by the absence of water—by conditions that prevent what is planted from taking root and spreading. Tennessee does not lack lawyers in the aggregate; it lacks them where need is concentrated and resources are thin, doing the work that ordinary people actually require. Widening the path into the profession may be defensible on its own terms, and a handful of admission-adjacent reforms may even help at the margins. But the Court should not mistake the production of more credentials for the irrigation of the desert. The two are different problems, and only one of them is solved at the gate.