The Illinois bar is older, more concentrated, and more under-succeeded than its public conversation acknowledges. The Supreme Court has noticed.
On April 27, 2026, the Illinois Supreme Court announced amendments to five Supreme Court Rules — Rules 705, 711, 717, 793, and 795 — explicitly framed as a response to legal deserts in the state. The amendments roll out across three effective dates over the next ten months. The package was proposed by the Court's Executive Committee on the Practice of Law, formed in 2023 specifically to address what the Court has now publicly acknowledged is a structural problem with the geographic distribution of Illinois lawyers.
This is the right time to look honestly at the underlying numbers. Not because the Court has moved — though that is news — but because the rule amendments are an intervention into a system whose actual mechanics deserve scrutiny on their own terms. The intervention may help. It may also fail in predictable ways. Both are worth understanding.
The numbers tell a clear story. The Illinois bar is older than it was twenty years ago. It is more geographically concentrated than it was twenty years ago. It is replacing fewer of its retiring members than it did even five years ago. And the practitioners most exposed to these trends — solo and small-firm lawyers in non-metro counties — have, by the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission's own data, prepared less than a quarter of the time for what happens when they stop practicing.
This is the demographic cliff. It is the first of the three forces this series is examining, and it is the precondition for the other two.
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How old is the Illinois bar?
The 2024 ARDC Annual Report, filed with the Illinois Supreme Court in April 2025, puts the total Master Roll of Illinois attorneys at 96,821 — a 0.4 percent increase over the prior year. That is the headline. The more interesting number is buried in the demographics section: in 2024, the number of Illinois lawyers transitioning to retired status outnumbered the new admittees added to the roll. This is not a one-year anomaly that can be dismissed. It is the trend line catching up to the demographics.
Almost half of Illinois lawyers are over fifty. Roughly one in five is sixty-five or older. The percentage of lawyers seventy and older has roughly tripled over the last decade. This is sometimes presented as a feel-good story about the staying power of the profession — lawyers who love the work, who keep doing it because they want to. Some of that is real. But the structural reading is different. The bar's age distribution looks the way it does because the entry rate at the bottom has not kept pace with the population at the top, and because the people at the top do not have credible exit options.
The ARDC's data on solo practitioners makes this concrete. Only twenty-three percent of active Illinois solos report having a written succession plan. Three-quarters do not. A practice with no written succession plan is not actually a practice in any transferable sense — it is a personal license being exercised by an individual until the individual stops, at which point the clients, the files, the goodwill, and the institutional knowledge dissipate or are absorbed haphazardly by whoever happens to be available. For solo practitioners in counties with three or four lawyers total, there is often no one available.
There is a cleaner way to frame this than the usual hand-wringing about generational handoff. Most Illinois solo practitioners are running practices that, on current trajectory, will simply end. Not transfer. End. The clients will be redirected to whatever options remain, which in many counties will be no options at all.
Most Illinois solo practitioners are running practices that, on current trajectory, will simply end. Not transfer. End.
Where the lawyers are
Aging is the temporal axis of the demographic problem. Geography is the spatial one. In Illinois, the spatial concentration is more extreme than most state-level data suggest, and it has been getting worse rather than better.
The Illinois Supreme Court's own Commission on Professionalism, in its 2Civility analysis of new admittee data, reports that of the 8,327 Illinois resident attorneys admitted in the four years preceding the most recent count, 7,625 — 91.6 percent — are practicing in Cook County or one of the seven collar counties. The Court itself, in its April 27 announcement, used a slightly different framing: more than 90 percent of attorneys licensed between 2020 and 2024 work in Cook or a surrounding collar county. Same number, same problem.
This is not the picture of a state with a lawyer shortage. Illinois ranks among the top five states in the country for total lawyer population. The picture is a state where almost all the new lawyers are practicing in roughly nine percent of its land area, and where the remaining ninety percent of the geography — eighty-plus counties — is being supplied by an aging cohort of practitioners who were trained when the geographic distribution was different.
The standard descriptor is "legal desert." The American Bar Association defines a legal desert as a county with fewer than one private-practice attorney per thousand residents. By that definition, the Illinois State Bar Association reports more than fifty Illinois counties qualify. Three Illinois counties have only a single attorney each. Thirty-five counties have ten or fewer private-practice attorneys total. The Commission on Professionalism has identified thirty-three counties that registered zero new attorneys over a four-year period.
Numbers of this kind tend to read abstractly. The concrete version is this: in those counties, an order of protection hearing is scheduled, and the petitioner walks in pro se because the respondent has retained the only family-law attorney in the county and the next-nearest one is forty miles away. The probate of a small estate is delayed eight months because no lawyer in the county is willing to take it for a flat fee under three thousand dollars. The county's assistant state's attorney position has been posted for fourteen months and the county board is having serious conversations about contracting prosecution out to a neighboring jurisdiction. The local bank's general counsel work is being handled by an attorney based in St. Louis who has never set foot in the county.
None of these scenarios is hypothetical. All of them are happening somewhere in Illinois right now.
Why the new lawyers don't go
The next obvious question is why the geographic distribution has tilted so heavily toward Cook and the collar counties. The conventional answer points to two factors: salary differentials and law school debt. Both are real, both are insufficient as a complete explanation.
The salary differential is straightforward. A first-year associate at a Chicago BigLaw firm in 2026 starts at roughly $245,000. A first-year associate at a small firm in a county seat — if such a position exists at all — typically earns somewhere between $65,000 and $90,000. The starting differential is not the most important number. The five-year and ten-year differentials, compounded, are.
The debt burden compounds the salary problem. The most recent data from the Education Data Initiative puts the average total cost of a three-year JD at roughly $221,000. The 2025–26 average tuition across the ten ABA-accredited Illinois law schools is around $54,000 for residents. A graduate of one of the more expensive Illinois schools — the University of Chicago at $84,825 per year, Northwestern Pritzker at $77,532, or Loyola at the mid-range — leaves with debt service obligations that effectively foreclose a sub-$100,000 starting salary unless that salary comes with a public-interest loan repayment program.
But the salary-and-debt story is incomplete. Even law students who say they want to practice in non-metro Illinois — and there are some — face two practical barriers that have nothing to do with money. The first is that the firms that would hire them often cannot offer the training infrastructure a new associate needs. A solo or two-lawyer firm cannot run a structured first-year program. The new graduate joining such a firm is, in significant part, on her own. The second is that the social and professional networks that sustain a young lawyer's career — bar association sections, peer cohorts, mentorship — are concentrated where the lawyers are concentrated. A new graduate moving to a county with eight lawyers and an average age of fifty-eight is making a structural bet that those eight lawyers will adequately serve as her professional community for the next decade. Most graduates, sensibly, decline the bet.
The Court's April 2026 amendments are a serious attempt to address the structural problem. They are also, on close inspection, partial solutions to a problem the Court is correctly diagnosing but only partially equipped to solve.
What the Court actually did
The April 2026 package contains five distinct rule changes. They are worth taking individually, because they address different parts of the problem and have different prospects of working.
Rule 711, effective January 1, 2027, expands the temporary supervised-practice license. Under existing rule, a 711 license is available to law students who have completed at least half their required credits and to law graduates who have registered for the Illinois bar exam. The amendment allows graduates to retain the license if they do not pass on the first attempt, and pilots an expansion to graduates affiliated with private firms in four judicial circuits — the southern and northwestern tips of the state and a center band including DeKalb, Kendall, Bureau, LaSalle, and Grundy counties. Effective January 1, 2027, Illinois will also accept Uniform Bar Exam scores from other jurisdictions, lowering a procedural barrier to multi-state practice.
Rule 717, effective July 15, 2026, removes the existing eighteen-month time limit on temporary licenses for out-of-state attorneys practicing in legal aid or public defense within Illinois. Companion changes to Rule 705 allow time spent practicing under Rule 717 to count toward the experience requirements for admission on motion. This is the closest thing in the package to an active recruitment tool: it tells out-of-state attorneys willing to work in legal aid that their time will accrue toward Illinois admission rather than expiring.
Rules 793 and 795, effective October 1, 2026, modify the Basic Skills Course required of newly admitted attorneys. New licenses issued on or after January 1, 2028 will require some professional education on topics related to unmet legal needs in Illinois. This is a curricular change. It signals values; it does not move bodies.
The Court's diagnosis is correct. Illinois has a distribution problem more than a quantity problem, and the legitimate path to addressing it runs through licensing structure, supervision rules, and the entry pipeline. The amendments do real work on those levers.
But the analytical limit is also straightforward. Rule 711's central mechanism is supervised practice — a temporary licensee must work under the supervision of an Illinois-licensed attorney. In a county with three lawyers, all of whom are over sixty, the supervisor pool is precisely the resource the legal desert lacks. Rule 711 expansion in those counties is most useful where there is at least one viable supervising firm. The pilot circuits the Court identified do contain such firms, and the rule is plainly designed to give those firms a mechanism to bring in supervised graduates earlier and at lower cost. That is helpful. But it is helpful at the margin — it can extend the runway of the supervising firm, not replace the supervising firm.
Rule 717's removal of the eighteen-month limit on out-of-state legal aid attorneys is more directly useful, because it addresses a population (legal aid lawyers) and a sector (legal aid organizations) that already operate outside the standard private-practice economic model. Rule 705's amendment makes the pathway from temporary practice to full admission cleaner. Together, those changes give legal aid organizations a more realistic recruitment pitch. They do not, however, change the underlying economics of private practice in non-metro Illinois.
The honest assessment is that the April 2026 amendments are good policy and an inadequate solution. They are good policy because they remove identifiable structural barriers — the bar-exam-failure cliff under Rule 711, the eighteen-month timer under Rule 717, the lost time under Rule 705 — and they signal that the Court takes the geographic distribution problem seriously. They are inadequate because the underlying economics of practicing law in a county with eight thousand residents and three working lawyers are not addressed by a licensing rule. The economics are addressed, if at all, by some combination of loan forgiveness, technology infrastructure, alternative practice models, and capital — which are exactly the topics this series turns to in Parts III and IV.
The April 2026 amendments are good policy and an inadequate solution.
What the cliff actually looks like
Aging plus concentration plus low succession-plan adoption produces a specific failure mode that is worth describing precisely. It is not a slow decline. It is a series of step-function drops.
Consider a county of fifteen thousand residents with seven private-practice attorneys. The mean age is sixty-two. Three of the seven are over seventy. None of them has a written succession plan. The county's legal services capacity looks stable in the aggregate as long as nothing happens. Then one of the seventy-plus practitioners dies suddenly. His files go to whichever of the remaining six lawyers can absorb them, with predictable degradation in service quality and continuity. Eighteen months later, another retires due to health. The remaining five absorb what they can. The local bank, watching this, retains Chicago counsel. The county's real estate volume that used to support two and a half practitioners now supports one and a half. The remaining lawyers begin declining new clients in practice areas they consider marginal — modest probate, plaintiff-side employment, family law for clients who cannot pay full freight.
This is the cliff. It is not a forecast. It is a description of what is currently happening across multiple Illinois counties, on rolling timelines that are mostly invisible to the urban legal press because they involve no single newsworthy event. The aggregate effect — measured in unfiled probate cases, pro se petitioners, county prosecutor vacancies, and contracts going unreviewed — is severe and getting worse.
The cliff is also where the other two forces this series is examining intersect with the demographic story. An aging solo with no successor and a book of clients she cares about is precisely the practitioner that capital-backed roll-up structures are designed to acquire. Her failure to secure a traditional successor makes the non-traditional buyer more attractive. The mid-size county-seat firm that has lost two partners to retirement and cannot afford the AI infrastructure its clients are starting to expect is precisely the firm that becomes interested in private equity participation through an MSO, or that begins fielding calls from regional consolidators. The technology gap and the capital gap both compound the demographic gap.
Part III takes up the capital piece in detail. For now, the relevant point is that the demographic cliff is the substrate the rest of the series stands on. Without the demographic problem, the consolidation thesis the conventional commentary advances would not have the supply of motivated sellers it requires. The supply is real. The motivation is real. The question is what the buyers look like, what they actually buy, and whether the structures emerging to facilitate the transactions serve the practitioners and clients involved or merely extract value from them.
What the demographic cliff makes urgent
There is a temptation, when writing about access-to-justice problems, to write as though the audience is a policymaker. The audience for this series is mostly other practitioners. The relevant questions are practitioner questions.
If you are a solo or small-firm lawyer in Illinois over fifty without a written succession plan, the structural reality is that the ARDC's 2024 data describes you and roughly seventy-seven percent of your peers. You are operating a practice that, on its current trajectory, will not transfer. Whatever your retirement timeline, the work of building an exit option needs to start earlier than the literature suggests, because the traditional buyers — the younger associate looking to make partner, the next-generation family member, the local mid-size firm — exist in lower numbers than the cohort needing to exit. Capital-backed buyers are real but come with terms that warrant careful evaluation, which Part III is about.
If you are a younger lawyer considering whether to stay at a small firm or accept the partnership track at a larger one, the demographic data argues that the small-firm option has more pricing power than its conventional reputation suggests. The competition for substantive work outside Chicago is thinning, not deepening. The infrastructure problem that small firms have historically faced — the inability to match institutional firms' operational tooling — is now solvable in ways that are the subject of Part IV.
If you are a law student or recent graduate, the calculus is harder. The Court's 711 expansion gives you more flexibility than the previous regime. The geographic concentration of opportunities in Chicago is real. The thesis this series advances — that the small and solo practice model has more future than the consolidation forecast assumes — is contestable, and you should read Parts III and IV before betting your career on it. But the binary the conventional advice presents — BigLaw associate or marginal small-town practice — is becoming false in ways that are worth understanding before you make irreversible choices.
And if you are a regulator, a law school administrator, or a bar leader, the question is whether the levers available to you are the levers the problem needs. The Illinois Supreme Court has acted seriously on the levers it controls. Most of the remaining levers — economic, technological, structural — are outside the Court's direct authority. They are the topics the rest of this series engages.
Part III runs next week: capital, MSOs, Texas Opinion 706, and what the Illinois bar has not yet decided about who is allowed to own what.
SOURCES & VERIFICATION
Demographic figures draw from the ARDC 2024 Annual Report (filed April 22, 2025) and the ISBA's summary commentary. The 91.6 percent Cook/collar concentration figure is from the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism's 2Civility analysis ("The Disappearing Rural Lawyer, Part IV"). The April 27, 2026 Supreme Court rule announcement and the underlying amendments to Rules 705, 711, 717, 793, and 795 are documented in the Illinois Supreme Court press release, the WCIA reporting, and the ISBA's summary. Tuition and law school enrollment figures reflect the 2025–26 academic year and the ABA 509 reports for Illinois schools. The succession-plan figure is from the ARDC 2024 Annual Report demographics section. Specific case examples in the "What the cliff actually looks like" section are composite descriptions consistent with reported circumstances; no individual practitioner or county is identified.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RM is an Illinois transactional attorney and the founder of Nomos Insights LLC, a solo practice combining substantive legal counsel with proprietary operational infrastructure. He writes about the structural forces reshaping legal practice and what they mean for solo and small-firm lawyers. Practice with intent.