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The Indiana Senate’s Local Government Committee unanimously approved a bill Thursday that would expand the pool of attorneys eligible to serve as corporation counsel for Indiana counties.
Senate Bill 524 would allow an attorney in a neighboring county to serve as the corporation counsel.
The state’s current law requires corporation counsel to reside in the county they’re serving.
The bill was also amended by the committee to specify the attorney has to be an Indiana resident, with the amendment preventing attorneys from neighboring border states from serving as corporation counsel in Indiana.
“What it basically does is allows second-class cities to be able to hire corporation counsel from a contiguous county. It doesn’t require it. It just really is an option, and it’s intended to be able to open up the pool of candidates for corporation counsel,” Sen. Cyndi Carrasco, R-Indianapolis, the bill’s author, said in committee.
A third-class city is a municipality with a population of less than 7,000. A second-class city is a municipality with a population of 34,000-599,999.
In a second-class city, the corporation counsel is the head of the department of law. The corporation counsel’s first deputy is the city attorney and the corporation counsel’s second deputy is the assistant city attorney.
In a third-class city, the city attorney is the head of the department of law.
Justin Forkner, Chief Administrative Officer of the Indiana Supreme Court and Co-Chair of the Commission on Indiana’s Legal Future, testified before the committee in support of the bill.
“We are, if you haven’t heard me say it, in a critical attorney shortage across Indiana, we are 10th from the bottom nationally in terms of attorneys per capita at 2.3 per 1000 residents. Last place for your reference is 2.1 so we are not that far from the bottom,” Forkner said. “Half of our counties qualify as legal deserts.”
He said one of the many ways the commission is looking to address the attorney shortage is by looking at the statutory and legal infrastructure in the state. SB 524 is an example of that.
The bill is headed to the full Senate for consideration.
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