Valpo Law closure already being felt in northwest Indiana after 3 years: Shortage of attorneys only getting worse in region

Three years after Valparaiso University Law School closed its doors, attorneys in northwest Indiana say they’re already seeing the impact of losing what had been a reliable feeder of lawyers into the surrounding communities.

Now, in a state already dealing with a shortage of attorneys, the part of Indiana affectionately called “The Region” may have to brace for an even bigger fallout.

“It’s dire,” Court of Appeals of Indiana Judge Nancy Vaidik, a Valparaiso Law alum, said. “We have a problem.”

Vaidik grew up in Portage — about a 25-minute drive from Valparaiso — and graduated from the law school in 1980.

She practiced law in Porter County and Lake County before becoming a judge.

Vaidik said even some of the larger law firms in the area are having a hard time finding attorneys.

“It makes sense,” she said, “because without Valpo there’s no feeder for northwest Indiana.”

Where law school grads are going

The Indiana Public Defender Commission highlighted the ongoing attorney shortage in its July newsletter with a 10-page article showing, among other things, that Indiana law schools produced fewer graduates in 2021 than they did four years earlier.

Part of the issue, the commission said, was Valparaiso’s closing in 2020.

As of 2019, about 18% of the attorneys practicing in Indiana had gone to Valparaiso Law School, according to the report. And in the final three years from which statistics are available — 2015 to 2017 — Valparaiso graduates were employed in Indiana at rates of 50%, 52% and 40%, respectively.

“It is difficult to precisely quantify the effect of Valparaiso’s closing,” the report says, “but it seems likely that it has contributed to the attorney shortage in Indiana.”

The commission calculated the former average of Valparaiso graduates staying in Indiana at 47%, which was second-highest among in-state law schools, behind Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law’s 85% in 2022.

The staying-home rate for Notre Dame Law School — about an hour from Valparaiso — was an estimated 6%.

‘They’re kind of hard to find’

The Porter County Prosecutor’s Office used to have a nice set setup with Valparaiso students, according to the county’s current prosecutor, Gary Germann, a Valparaiso Law graduate who is serving his second term in office.

Because of the school’s proximity, Germann said the office typically relied on students for its internship slots, which gave the future lawyers experience and, in turn, helped the office.

But without the law school there, things have changed.

“Right now, we’ve had to look to Chicago law schools or Notre Dame for interns,” Germann said. “And they’re kind of hard to find.”

And when it comes to hiring attorneys, Germann said the office used to be able to post openings with the school and could count on 10-15 applicants.

That applicant pool is gone now.

Renee Ortega, an attorney with Hammond Legal Aid, said in her experience, when it comes to students who want to pursue a law degree, they’re going south to IU McKinney in Indianapolis or the Indiana University Maurer School of Law in Bloomington.

And once they leave, Ortega said, it seems many aren’t coming back.

In that way, northwest Indiana’s lawyer shortage resembles the same issue attorneys talk about in other parts of the state — law students are sticking in bigger cities and landing at bigger firms instead of cutting their teeth in smaller firms or public interest law.

The trend isn’t totally surprising to Ortega, who said she understands there are economic pressures to find higher paying jobs as graduates start staring down student loans from their undergraduate degrees and law school.

“You’re not exactly looking to start off making only 60 to 70 grand,” she said, “because that’s not going to cut it.”

What can be done?

Vaidik said she attended the last graduation ceremony for Valparaiso in 2020, which she described as a “somber” event.

And that was only three years ago, meaning the impact of the school’s closing on northwest Indiana’s lawyer shortage has become obvious in a relatively short amount of time — a problem Vaidik said she fears will only continue to worsen in the years ahead.

But Vaidik also said the situation isn’t hopeless.

She pointed to solutions such as letting graduates from schools like Purdue Global Law School sit for the Indiana bar exam.

The Indiana Supreme Court is currently weighing the possibility of allowing graduates from non-American Bar Association-accredited law schools to sit for the exam, though the Indianapolis Bar Association and Indiana State Bar Association are both opposed.

The advantage to loosening current restrictions, Vaidik said, is that it would allow people who are already part of those communities to study law and become licensed while staying where they are.

Vaidik said she’s also a proponent of allowing nonlawyer legal navigators to work on divorce cases, wills, deeds, tenant-landlord disputes and other similar things.

“You could create an army of people to do that,” she said.

Ortega, who is also president of the Lake County Bar Association, floated the idea of satellite law schools that could function in northwest Indiana, with the idea again being that it would make staying in the area more realistic.

Such a setup could help foster the type of legal community that already exists in The Region, where so many of the legal professionals seem to have gotten their education from the same school: Valparaiso.

Germann said he sees those connections in the community.

“You come to school here, you like the community,” he said. “The jobs are available.”•