Breaking the ABA Bottleneck Is the Best Thing to Happen to Access to Justice in Decades

For more than seventy years, one private trade association has decided who gets to become a lawyer in most of America. Not a court. Not a legislature. A professional membership organization whose accreditation arm is staffed largely by the very law schools it regulates.

That era is ending, and it should. By late December, the U.S. Department of Education is expected to decide whether the American Bar Association's accrediting council keeps the federal recognition it has held since 1952. Department staff have already recommended against renewal. Texas and Florida have stopped treating ABA approval as the only ticket to the bar exam, and courts in Ohio, Tennessee, Alabama and Washington are moving in the same direction.

Most of the commentary frames this as a culture-war fight. I want to make a different case — a practical one, from someone who actually serves clients. Loosening the ABA's grip is good for lawyers, good for students, and above all good for the ordinary people who can't get a lawyer today.

The justice gap is a supply problem

America does not have a lawyer shortage. It has a shortage of affordable lawyers in the places and practice areas where regular people need them.

The Legal Services Corporation's most recent Justice Gap study found that low-income Americans get no help, or not enough help, for 92 percent of the civil legal problems that substantially affect their lives. Nearly half of those who didn't seek help cited cost. These are evictions, custody disputes, debt collection suits, benefits denials, and estates that sit in limbo because no one could afford to open probate.

Geography makes it worse. The ABA's own profile of the profession found 54 counties in the United States with no lawyer at all, another 182 with only one or two, and close to 1,300 counties with fewer than one lawyer per thousand residents. If you live in one of those places and need a will, a deed, or a divorce, you drive — or you go without.

The question is why the market hasn't filled that gap. A big part of the answer is the price of entry.

One model, one price

The dominant ABA-accredited model is familiar: a three-year J.D., a substantial full-time faculty, extensive facilities, and limits on how much teaching practicing lawyers can do. ABA standards permit accelerated programs, but the prevailing model still costs money, and students pay it — often with substantial federal loans.

A graduate carrying that debt cannot afford to hang a shingle in a rural county doing $1,500 estate plans and $2,500 probate matters. The math pushes them toward big-city firms and high-margin work. The ABA model doesn't just make legal education expensive; it steers new lawyers away from the clients who need them most.

This isn't only my view. In March, Federal Trade Commission staff wrote to the Florida Supreme Court supporting its decision to end exclusive reliance on the ABA, pointing to the competitive harm of a single accreditor. And this month, the Justice Department gave the ABA a deadline to justify its limits on adjunct faculty, arguing they suppress competition and inflate tuition.

When both the antitrust regulators and the education regulators reach the same conclusion, it's time to pay attention.

What competition would actually produce

Open the door to alternative accreditation and you create more room for experimentation:

Wider use of two-year J.D. programs and combined undergraduate-and-law tracks, which already exist within ABA accreditation, to reduce the time and opportunity cost of becoming a lawyer.

Practitioner-taught courses, where working judges and attorneys teach the skills clients actually pay for — drafting, negotiation, closings, motion practice.

Low- or no-tuition schools that don't depend on federal loans at all.

Regionally focused programs built to train lawyers for the communities around them, including rural and underserved areas.

A new lawyer who graduates with $30,000 in debt instead of $200,000 can charge less, take more modest-fee matters, and practice where they grew up. That is how you close a justice gap: not with another task force, but by lowering the cost of producing the people who deliver the service.

Quality control doesn't disappear

Critics warn that this will flood the market with poorly trained lawyers. It won't, because the ABA was never the last line of defense.

State supreme courts still control admission, including applicable examination and character-and-fitness requirements. Lawyers still answer to state disciplinary systems and malpractice exposure. Florida's rule change keeps the ABA as an option; it simply stops treating it as the only one. California has admitted graduates of state-accredited, non-ABA schools for decades without the sky falling.

Accountability belongs with the courts and the bar exam — public institutions answerable to the people — not with a private association's checklist about faculty ratios and library square footage.

Taking the objections seriously

There are fair concerns, and the transition should be handled carefully.

Portability. A graduate of a state-approved school may be able to sit for the bar in Texas or Florida but not in states that still require ABA approval. States will need reciprocity arrangements, and students deserve clear disclosures before they enroll.

Federal aid. University-based law schools may retain federal-aid eligibility through their universities' recognized institutional accreditation, subject to applicable federal requirements. Freestanding schools that rely on the ABA's federal recognition may need another recognized accreditor or an approved transition.

Consumer protection. Any new accreditor should publish hard outcome data — bar passage, employment, debt — so students can compare programs honestly. Competition works best with transparency.

None of these is a reason to preserve a monopoly. They are reasons to build the replacement well.

The bottom line

The legal profession likes to say that justice should not depend on the size of your bank account. Then it maintains a training system that guarantees lawyers are expensive to make and expensive to hire.

Ending the ABA's exclusive gatekeeping role won't fix access to justice by itself. But it removes one of the biggest structural barriers standing in the way. Florida has taken the first step. The rest of the country should follow — and those of us who practice here should help prove that a more open profession can be both excellent and affordable.

William Josh Brown is an attorney with TrustSphere Legal. The views expressed are his own.