silver tsunami is sweeping the nation, and attorneys in Alaska are part of the tide. The profession is aging, and practitioners are retiring faster than younger counterparts are ready to replace them. The median age of attorneys is 55, meaning half are less than a decade away from the traditional retirement age in the United States. The Alaska Bar Association (ABA) recognizes the need to attract more qualified attorneys, so the group is already taking steps to ensure the state has enough attorneys to maintain a robust legal system.

While the demographics for attorneys are trending older, ABA Executive Director Danielle Bailey says extensive education (undergraduate plus three years of law school) means lawyers typically enter the workforce later in life than the average professional. Of the 2,258 active attorneys in the state, 79 percent are under 65 years old. The two largest active bar-age demographics are 35 to 44-year-olds (25 percent) and 45 to 54-year-olds (23 percent). However, the three oldest age ranges (55 to 64, 65 to 74, and 75-plus) account for 39 percent of the total. With many attorneys reaching retirement age, recruiting students into legal fields remains a consistent need in Alaska. However, the profession faces a significant challenge: Alaska is the only state without a law school.

To overcome this challenge, ABA’s 2026–2028 strategic plan aims to increase the number of qualified attorneys and educational opportunities that allow students to study remotely when possible. Likewise, ABA continues to promote existing University of Alaska partnerships with law schools that can facilitate partial remote learning, scholarships, and other opportunities.

The ABA strategic plan addresses three main goals: increase access to qualified attorneys, strengthen member engagement, and support the mental health and wellbeing of Alaska lawyers. The first goal encompasses three subgoals. The first subgoal addresses pathways to licensure by assessing current admission licenses and associated waiver fees and evaluating the merits of alternative pathways. The second subgoal focuses on pipeline development, which includes seeking applicants who reflect the population served by lawyers, expanding outreach and connections to Alaska schools and law schools, and involving legal interns and law clerks. The final subgoal is changes to the bar exam. This could include exploring efficiency opportunities in character and fitness assessments, reviewing or revising applications, or transitioning to the NextGen Unified Bar Exam, which launched in July to better evaluate attorneys’ real-world skills.

To strengthen member engagement, ABA identifies technological and in-person activities toward that goal. Listed under this goal is the expansion of member connectedness through section listservs, improving how consumers find and connect with Alaska lawyers, expanding bar activities in rural areas and among rural practitioners, creating local and affinity bar partnerships, exploring new section or member groups, enhancing the ABA website as a resource hub, and collecting bar member engagement metrics.

For the wellbeing of lawyers, ABA focuses on ensuring attorneys have resources that prevent burnout and maintain wellness through continuing education and awareness; exploring the need for additional member benefits, such as free, confidential counseling sessions; assessing the need for a mentorship program; and developing member resources for business continuity and succession.

While only one subgoal centers explicitly on raising the number of lawyers in Alaska, the entire strategy supports recruitment and retention. “We have done and are continuing to do a lot in this area to build a pipeline of attorneys,” says Bailey.

Maintaining a consistent number of attorneys in Alaska is vital to the legal system. Bailey says government agencies (court system, public defenders, prosecutors) and legal aid organizations are often hit the hardest when the number of attorneys decreases. Because government agencies often face budgetary constraints, they already face recruitment and retention challenges. Overall, fewer attorneys can worsen existing access-to-justice issues. Bailey says the ABA is aware of the access-to-justice gap and the barriers that prevent individuals from understanding or asserting their legal rights. In the past year, ABA expanded its Bar-sponsored legal clinics by 250 percent. In total, 685 clients were served through 1,752 volunteer hours by member attorneys.

ABA has taken several approaches to increasing the recruitment of new attorneys, such as altering requirements for those practicing law in Alaska and for out-of-state attorneys. ABA also strengthened its educational outreach for Alaskan students interested in pursuing legal careers and advocated for accredited remote law schools so that students won’t have to relocate.

One major change was to reduce the required Uniform Bar Exam (UBE) score from 280 to 270. Before attorneys can practice in Alaska, they must pass the UBE, which tests skills and general national legal principles needed to practice law among the forty states that have adopted the standardized exam. The UBE is different from a traditional state bar exam, which focuses on laws specific to that jurisdiction, and instead offers score portability. Attorneys can transfer to any of the other forty UBE jurisdictions without retaking the exam. This is not the case with traditional bar exam scores that are tied exclusively to the state in which they were tested.

Alaska’s passing threshold was relatively high, and it still is. “Despite lowering our score, Alaska is still tied with having the highest cut score in the nation,” says Bailey.

ABA also amended its admission-on-motion rules to allow more people to practice in Alaska. Admission on motion allows out-of-state attorneys to be licensed in Alaska even if they have not taken the UBE in the past five years. To qualify, attorneys must have 750 hours of “active practice of law” in three of the five years prior to application, in addition to three notarized affidavits. Previously, the active practice threshold was five years of active practice out of seven years prior to application.

Other changes include removing a requirement to pass a written bar exam for admission on motion, which allows ABA to accept more applicants from states that are creating pathways to admission that don’t involve a bar exam. ABA also eliminated reciprocity requirements that only granted admission to attorneys from other jurisdictions that also gave it to Alaska. Also, to increase the services in Alaska, ABA successfully changed a rule that now allows out-of-state attorneys to participate in pro bono practice under the supervision of a qualified legal services provider. Likewise, ABA created a new practice waiver for non-lawyers supervised and trained by Alaska Legal Services Corporation, a nonprofit that provides free legal aid to low-income Alaskans for civil matters.

On the educational front, ABA launched a scholarship program that has raised more than $130,000 to support 119 law students with ties to Alaska. These students have committed to returning to the state after law school. The American Bar Association currently lists twenty-one remote accredited law schools that prospective law students can enroll in while living in Alaska. Several Alaska universities have partnerships with law schools that can facilitate direct admission, reduce time to degree completion, and offer scholarships, dual degrees, or other benefits. Likewise, some law schools also offer in-state tuition to Alaska residents.

UAA partners with Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to guarantee UAA students admission to a program that offers the opportunity to attend law school primarily remotely from Alaska. If a student meets certain academic thresholds and additional criteria, they will be guaranteed admission to the blended learning model at Mitchell Hamline, which combines distance learning and in-person education. Students enrolled in this model can attend law school from anywhere in Alaska, spending a few weeks per year on campus.

The UAF Pre-Law Program has partnerships with eight schools, two of which have law school scholarship agreements. The agreements between UAF and the eight law schools allow students to complete a bachelor’s and juris doctor degree in six years, saving a year of time and tuition by starting law school after three undergraduate years. The number of remote classes varies between the schools, as does the level of financial assistance.

UAS offers two paths to a law degree. The school allows undergraduate students and alumni to gain admission to Willamette University School of Law in Salem, Oregon, based on certain academic credentials. When a student meets these credentials, they will be admitted to Willamette Law and be guaranteed a direct admission scholarship of $10,000, renewable each year the student is enrolled at Willamette Law and remains in good standing.

UAS announced in July a new partnership with Mitchell Hamline School of Law that will enable its students and alumni to earn a law degree without having to leave Alaska. The two-pronged agreement offers a scholarship of at least 50 percent off tuition to the school and the opportunity to receive bachelor’s and law degrees in a total of six years instead of seven. Full-time UAS students admitted to Mitchell Hamline in their third undergraduate year can complete their final year at UAS as first-year law students.

“Between remote law schools and university partnerships, there actually may have never been a better and cheaper time for Alaskans to go to law school,” says Bailey.

The ABA website also has a new page that advertises legal clerkships and internships. Moreover, at the end of July, ABA hosted its 3rd Annual Legal Career Fair.

“I personally wrote to every career office at every ABA-accredited law school in the country to give them links to our job bulletin boards and make sure they were aware of career opportunities in Alaska,” says Bailey. “We also mailed them postcards for them to hand out that contained QR codes to direct students to this information as well.”

As long as ABA oversees which schools can seat graduates for the bar exam in Alaska, then Outside partnerships will remain its main tool for in-state legal training. By combating the brain drain of young lawyers leaving the state, new professionals can step up to replenish the graying bar.