Over a Half Year Later: CJ Rush's "Legal Future" Commission Produced a a Mountain of Meetings and a Mouse of Reform

More than half a year ago last November, Chief Justice Loretta Rush triumphantly signed an order that announced her response to the final recommendations of the Commission on Indiana's Legal Future.

The message was clear: Indiana had a legal crisis. ONE SHE CREATED FOLKS.

There were too few lawyers in many counties. Rural communities struggled to attract attorneys. Access to justice problems were mounting. Public defenders, prosecutors, and legal aid organizations were stretched thin.

The diagnosis was not controversial. The treatment, however, appears to have been little more than another exercise in institutional self-preservation.

Many months later, Hoosier Enquirer's prediction appears to have been correct.

The grandly titled Commission on Indiana's Legal Future has largely produced what critics feared from the outset the presevation of Rush's job, state payroll checks for another year, and preserving her state pension(s).

Task forces.

Working groups.

Pilot programs.

Studies.

Committees studying committees.

And precious little actual reform.

In retrospect, the very creation of the Commission may have been an admission that Indiana's legal establishment had failed.

For years, long years of Rush's reign of terror, critics warned that excessive law school costs, regulatory barriers, attorney shortages, judicial inefficiencies, and declining public confidence were creating serious problems.

Only after the crisis became impossible to ignore did Indiana's legal leadership finally acknowledge that something was wrong.

Yet after implicitly admitting the existence of systemic failures, the Court's solution was remarkably modest.

No major restructuring.

No serious examination of attorney discipline.

No meaningful review of judicial accountability.

No substantial effort to lower barriers to entry into the profession.

No significant reconsideration of whether Indiana's legal institutions themselves helped create the very problems they were now studying.

Instead, the response largely consisted of encouraging more students to become lawyers and creating additional bureaucratic structures.

The Court approved recommendations to create working groups, improve messaging about legal careers, study clerk staffing, develop videos, explore mentorship programs, consider pipelines to law schools, and continue oversight through the Office of Judicial Administration.

In government terms, this is often called "doing something."

Critics just call it something else; "A nothing burger" or just more Rush doing and being Rush, a DEI failure as Indiana's first female Chief Justice of SCOIN.

Perhaps the most notable feature of the Commission's final order is what it did not address.

There was no serious discussion of whether Indiana's increasingly complex regulatory environment discourages lawyers from practicing in underserved communities.

No examination of whether disciplinary fears, escalating costs, and declining civility are driving attorneys from the profession.

No independent review of judicial administration.

No recommendations concerning transparency or accountability in attorney regulation.

No meaningful due process reforms.

No consideration of mediation or gatekeeping reforms such as "Doug's Law."

No discussion of why many experienced attorneys have simply chosen early retirement rather than continue practicing.

No serious effort to ask whether Indiana's legal leadership itself bears some responsibility for the current shortage.

That silence speaks volumes, creating no incentive to practice law in Indiana or restore trust in Rush's broken legal system or reversals of the years of court abuse she allowed Michael Witte to engage in.

Indeed, a year later, many of the recommendations remain exactly where they began:

In committees.

In studies.

In discussions.

In pilot programs.

Meanwhile, Indiana's lawyer shortage continues. Many rural counties still struggle to attract attorneys. HE wrote an article on this and yet no real response to the access to justice crisis, noting that absent from the list of newly barred attorneys were counties such as:

Vanderburgh (Evansville)

Tippecanoe (Lafayette)

Vigo (Terre Haute)

Madison (Anderson)

Delaware (Muncie)

Howard (Kokomo)

Poorly funded Legal Aid organizations remain overwhelmed. (The Indiana ACLU did not return calls to comment on the level of the demands on them.)

Small communities continue losing experienced practitioners to retirement or frustration with a court system where politics or identity politics make it beyond fair and just.

And the public's confidence in legal institutions remains extremely shaky. Even lawyers with suspended license aren't seeking to return to practice after completing their punishments. That speaks volumes. Either they know it is corrupt or they do not desire to be part of any it for reasons that need investigation and bright lights shown on the state of affairs.

Perhaps this outcome should not surprise anyone. The Commission itself was largely composed of members of the very legal establishment that presided over many of these developments. Rush remians responsible and leads the clean up, which is like having an 8th grade shop student who tossed the M80 into the bunson burner be in charge of finding out who did it.

As critics observed at the time, institutions rarely volunteer for meaningful self-reform. Instead, they tend to produce reports. And more reports. And recommendations to study additional reports.

Quite simply, ask the question already: Who in their right mind would pay to have happen to them what you did to so many lawyers in fake legal ethics cases, many still suspended for the careers they loved and passionately pursued.  Law schools are a fraud and then you get canceled, humilited and lied about by Rush.  Get rid of her already.

The November 5, 2025 order now reads less like a roadmap for reform and more like a document designed to demonstrate concern without requiring substantial change as HE predicted.

A year later, the central question remains unanswered:

If Indiana's legal system is facing a genuine crisis, where are the genuine reforms?

Because one thing is increasingly clear.

Creating additional task forces to study access to justice does not itself create access to justice.

Encouraging more students to consider law school does not automatically place attorneys in rural counties.

Producing informational videos does not solve attorney shortages. And issuing orders congratulating commissions for their "exceptional efforts" does not itself reform institutions.

The Commission on Indiana's Legal Future may ultimately be remembered less for what it accomplished than for what it represented: An implicit admission that Indiana's legal system has serious problems.

And an equally implicit decision to avoid confronting many of the difficult questions surrounding how those problems developed in the first place.

After one year of "study," the legal future envisioned by the Commission remains largely theoretical. The shortage or real lawyers remains. The concerns remain for legal ethics abuse reversals. The committees even remain. The crisis remains the same or worsened.

But meaningful reform? That appears to remain somewhere in the future after Rush leaves and the current justices retire sadly.