Systemic Failure: Indiana’s Legal Desert Is The Failed Test of Loretta Rush’s Judicial Leadership

Be assured these graduates won’t go into debt for law schools to end up with a dreadful law career practicing in rural Indiana under ethical rules that are unfair, and even more unfairly enforced as in In Re Doug Bernacchi and so many other DI cases.

Opinion | By Gregg Smith

INDIANAPOLIS — A person sitting in jail without a lawyer does not experience an attorney shortage as a workforce statistic. He experiences another night away from his children, another missed shift, another day without someone to ask whether he should be there at all. His employer suffers from the delay.

That is the human cost behind Indiana’s legal deserts.

For a parent seeking custody, a family settling an estate or a small business trying to collect an unpaid bill, the shortage means that having legal rights and being able to enforce them can be two very different things.

Indiana’s judicial leadership has acknowledged the problem. The harder question is whether it is willing to examine its own contribution to a profession that too many communities struggle to sustain.

Yes, court calendars are being slowed and significantly delayed across Indiana due to a severe shortage of lawyers.

Media outlets and State officials with placing blame for some strange reasons, including Indiana Supreme Court Chief Justice Loretta Rush, have explicitly classified the situation as a "deepening crisis".

The shortage directly causes case backlogs, extends the duration of civil matters like divorces, and leaves criminal defendants languishing in county jails due to a lack of available public defenders

The Commission on Indiana’s Legal Future described the shortage in its 2024 interim report as an “existential threat to the legal profession and those we serve.” 

That language should carry consequences for the people responsible for overseeing the system.

The numbers explain the alarm. Figures reported in 2025 put Indiana at 2.26 lawyers per 1,000 residents, ranking 43rd nationally. And 48th when considering practicing lawyers who help people rather than those holding licenses.

Of approximately 16,000 attorneys practicing in the state, more than 6,000—nearly 40%—were concentrated in Marion County. The judiciary’s published list identifies 49 counties as legal deserts. Going to Indianapolis for legal

Help is less than ideal especially in far northern counties.

Those county totals are only a starting point. A lawyer’s business address does not tell a family whether that lawyer handles custody disputes, accepts appointed cases or charges a fee it can afford. Even a county with several attorneys can leave residents with few practical options.

The consequences have already reached jail cells. In 2023, reporting documented dozens of Vanderburgh County defendants spending weeks in jail without representation amid a shortage of public defenders. That episode should remain a measure of institutional failure, not fade into the background as another staffing difficulty.

The strain extends to prosecution. Reporting on a 2025 staffing analysis described shortages across nearly 80 of Indiana’s 91 prosecutorial jurisdictions. A separate account cited the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council’s estimate that the state needed at least 500 additional prosecutors. Victims waiting for cases to move and defendants waiting to challenge the evidence both have something at stake.

“Our criminal justice machine is hungry,” Sarah McKinnon, chief public defender in Sedgwick County, Kansas, told a national reporting project republished by The Indiana Citizen. Her warning concerned the wider American crisis, but it captures a danger Indiana must confront: a system can keep accepting cases after it has exhausted the people needed to handle them fairly. The ABA ethics rules have caused the crisis in many states but particularly so here in Indiana where the State Constitutional gives exclusive rights to the high court, sarcastically called “the Supremes” by many practitioners.

“The Honorable” Chief Justice Loretta Rush announced the Commission on Indiana’s Legal Future in April 2024. “It’s imperative that we address this issue now and act,” she said.

The Court has since taken action. Its annual report describes relaxed reciprocity requirements, rural-practice assistance and work toward testing alternative legal-service models. A public-service scholarship program also became law in 2025. These are meaningful steps, and any fair criticism must acknowledge them. Her response has been as big of farce as her herself. How many wrongfully suspended lawyers did she place on that newest Commission—none, zero, zilch.

If she had they would tell her to unsuck the practice of law in Indiana, which continues to make a bad place to be a lawyer. Who in there right mind would voluntarily invest in such a shitty career?

But announcing programs is easier than demonstrating that residents can obtain help. Scholarships take time to produce practicing lawyers. Startup assistance cannot, by itself, make an overloaded public-defense job sustainable. Indiana needs public measures of results: how long people wait for appointed counsel, which offices cannot fill vacancies and whether rural lawyers remain after incentives expire.

Responsibility also extends beyond Rush. Legislators control state appropriations; counties make consequential staffing and compensation decisions. Debt, retirement and law-school closures affect supply. The Supreme Court nevertheless controls admission and professional regulation. Its response should include a searching examination of those powers.

The Hoosier Enquirer has argued that disciplinary practices aggravate the shortage. That is a serious contention deserving an independent review. The available statewide shortage figures do not establish that discipline caused the crisis or that rural lawyers are disproportionately targeted.

The answer is to publish the evidence needed to evaluate the claim. Indiana should release meaningful disciplinary data by practice setting and geography, with appropriate privacy safeguards, and examine the expense and duration of proceedings. Public protection requires effective discipline. It also requires a process lawyers and clients can trust.

Freedom to criticize the judiciary belongs in that review. Indiana’s Rule 8.2 prohibits knowingly false or recklessly false statements about judicial integrity or qualifications; it does not categorically prohibit criticism of judges. Even so, lawyers should have confidence that documented criticism and good-faith advocacy for reform will receive fair treatment. A court capable of regulating its critics must be especially careful about how it exercises that authority.

Indiana should also reconsider restrictions that make affordable practice unnecessarily difficult. Broader admission pathways, carefully supervised legal assistance and simpler ways to offer limited services deserve serious consideration. Each proposal should be judged by competence, affordability and access.

Finally, the state must protect the lawyers it expects to serve vulnerable people. Public defenders need manageable workloads, adequate support and a prompt response when a client makes a credible threat. Rule 1.16 requires court permission to withdraw when applicable law demands it. Courts should ensure that requests involving safety or an inability to provide competent representation receive urgent, reasoned decisions.

An Attorneys’ Bill of Rights could establish those protections while preserving clients’ ability to report genuine misconduct. Respect for defendants and respect for their lawyers are mutually reinforcing. Neither benefits when an exhausted attorney is assigned work that cannot responsibly be completed.

Indiana’s legal desert did not develop for one reason, and it will not disappear through one commission. But judicial leadership must accept accountability for outcomes as readily as it accepts authority over the profession.

The test is concrete: whether someone who needs a lawyer can find one, whether that lawyer has time to do the work and whether justice arrives while it can still make a difference.

I added that argument to the updated article⁠, including these passages:

Recruiting replacements cannot substitute for correcting an injustice. Rush should support an independent review of contested suspensions imposed during her tenure where lawyers present credible evidence of unsupported findings, excluded evidence or a denial of a meaningful opportunity to defend themselves. Where that review establishes that a suspension was unjustified, the Court should provide a prompt path to vacating the sanction, restoring the license and correcting the public record.

A lawyer whose livelihood was wrongly taken should not have to purchase redemption through an expensive reinstatement process that leaves the underlying error untouched. Nor should a lawyer’s reluctance to return be mistaken for proof that the original punishment was deserved. A profession that wants people to stay must give them reason to trust the institution governing their careers.

Doug’s Law offers another starting point. The proposal calls for two hours of independent, nonbinding mediation of ordinary client-lawyer disputes before a disciplinary Request for Investigation, with the client and lawyer each paying for one hour. The client could proceed after the mediator’s report, and the mediator could report suspected misconduct. An adopted rule should preserve urgent protective action for serious allegations requiring immediate investigation.

This proposal should attract bipartisan support: accessible dispute resolution, fair process and proportionate enforcement serve everyone. Independent mediation could resolve misunderstandings, fee disagreements and communication failures before they become prolonged disciplinary battles.

Rush’s leadership should be judged by whether she will subject the Court’s own machinery to scrutiny. Ethics must govern the institution enforcing the rules as rigorously as it governs the people subject to them.