Full steam ahead: Purdue Global students join ranks of state’s licensed attorneys

Five students from the Purdue Global Law School are celebrating two milestones this spring: not only did they pass the Indiana bar exam, but they became the first Purdue Global students to be admitted to the bar in Indiana.

The achievement is personal, both for the newest licensed attorneys in the state and for those who worked to get the law school to where it is today.

“We’re showing that people can get an accessible, affordable education and still achieve their professional goals,” said Martin Pritikin, dean of the law school.

The moment supports a decision made by the Indiana Supreme Court last February to allow graduates of non-American Bar Association-accredited law schools to sit for the Indiana bar exam.

A new milestone

Non-ABA-accredited law school students have been allowed to take the Indiana bar exam since last July, when changes to Admission and Discipline Rule 13 went into effect. But because the exam is only offered in February and July, students couldn’t take the bar until February 2025.

Abby Strehle, one of the five Purdue Global students admitted to the Indiana bar last month, took the exam in California first. The Indiana resident already had been scheduled to take the California test in February 2024, around the same time the Indiana Supreme Court issued an order amending Rule 13.

“At that point, I was already, you know, registered to take the bar, had my flight and my hotel booked and had been studying, and I was like, ‘well, I’m taking it,’” she said. “But I knew, obviously, that I wanted to take the Indiana bar because I wanted to have a full scope of practice in Indiana.”

Strehle took online classes through Purdue Global and that allowed her to pursue her law degree while continuing to work as a nurse and balance the needs of her family. After a long career in the medical field, Strehle said she decided to pivot when she realized she might not be able to maintain the physical stamina nursing demands.

Fellow Purdue Global graduate and licensed attorney Lindley Jarrett expressed a similar sentiment.

“Their program is really designed for full-time working adults like myself,” he said. “It provided me with the kind of flexibility to study and at the same time to advance in my professional career as an environmental health and safety professional.”

Jarrett, a chemical engineer, said he chose to go to law school because he wanted to be more involved in the legal aspects of his work. Now, he said he’s looking forward to leveraging his law education alongside his engineering experience to practice environmental and occupational health and safety law in the corporate sphere.

Both Jarrett and Strehle emphasized the quality of education they received through Purdue Global.

“We were exposed to the kind of academic rigor that would put us on track to be successful,” Jarrett said. “Quite frankly, you know, the curriculum was very challenging. The lectures are engaging, the coursework and all the assignments that they gave us really, really stretched us to do things that you wouldn’t imagine that you were able to do.”

Strehle said something many get wrong about an online school is that students must go without the academic community that’s frequently built at brick-and-mortar schools. Despite being online, she said that she and her peers built a strong rapport throughout their law school education, even through the bar exam.

“I took the California bar with a group of, like, 10 of my classmates… we stayed in these two hotels that were next to each other, and we walked to the convention center together. We had dinner afterwards. After it was over, we had a celebratory dinner together that we all just arranged ourselves, and we had a champagne toast in the hotel room,” she said.

Paving a new way

Purdue Global was the first in the United States to offer a fully online law school education. Originally known as the California-based Concord Law School, it was renamed in August 2023 in line with a recommendation by the Indiana Supreme Court to associate the law school with an Indiana-based educational institution whose legal education program is approved by the Indiana Commission for Higher Education.

Pritikin has been backing Purdue Global’s inclusion in the bar in several states for years, even before its association with the West Lafayette institution. The school previously approached Connecticut and Arizona about opening state bars to Concord’s graduates, but they declined, Pritikin told The Indiana Lawyer in May 2023, though Connecticut later agreed to let Purdue students sit for the exam.

So why did Indiana say yes?

In March 2023, Purdue University proposed amendments to Rules 6, 13, and 17.1 of the Indiana Rules for Admission to the Bar and the Discipline of Attorneys, citing the state’s lawyer shortage as an aggravating factor.

From there, the Indiana Supreme Court created the Purdue University Concord Law School Working Group to consider the school’s request.

Indiana Court of Appeals Judge Nancy Vaidik was part of the working group and saw the recommendation to add Purdue Global to the list of law schools eligible to sit for the bar as a possible solution to the ongoing lawyer shortage.

Last January, she told The Indiana Lawyer that the supreme court’s amendment to Rule 13 provided a great balance for offering quality assurance and consumer protection for lawyers, law students, and clients.

While bar associations in the state, including the Indiana State Bar Association and the Indianapolis Bar Foundation, were initially hesitant to support the rule change, they’re encouraged by the success of the Purdue Global students.

For the state bar association, many of their concerns with the change were addressed in the final rule, specifically with the supreme court requiring individual bar applications to be reviewed by a board of law examiners.

“These initial results are encouraging and are what we hope to see when the court created the current vetting system,” said Michael Jasaitis, president of the state bar association. “All five graduates passing the bar exam is a solid achievement. The ISBA is excited to welcome these new attorneys into our legal profession.”

What’s next? Pritikin said he hopes this achievement will mark a change in the way online law schools are perceived. And that eventually, new options are created.

“Hopefully it will create more opportunities, both with Indiana and beyond, that other regulators [and] courts will see that online law school is viable, and they’ll create opportunities, which would be, I think, a good thing, not just for those who go to law school, but for those who they would come to serve,” he said.•