Purdue Global Law School sees success in students as online school grows Indiana presence

Stefan May didn’t plan on becoming a lawyer. He actually wanted to be a police officer. It wasn’t until he spoke with someone in law enforcement that he realized his interests might be better aligned with the bench than the squad car.

An Indiana native, May knew his law school journey wouldn’t align with a traditional brick-and-mortar school: In northwest Indiana, the closest law school was at least two hours away, and he and his wife were raising a young family.

That’s when Purdue Global Law School came into the picture.

“The only reason I was able to pursue this and become a lawyer is, I can honestly say, because of Purdue,” he said.

Previously known as Concord Law School, Purdue Global Law School was established in 1998 as the country’s first fully online law school. In 2018, Purdue University took ownership of the school after acquiring its parent company, Kaplan High Education LLC. It was renamed Purdue Global Law School in 2023.

For most of its tenure, Purdue Global has operated predominately in California. In 2020, the school received full accreditation from the State Bar of California, meaning students could sit for the bar exam out west.

But in February 2024, the Indiana Supreme Court made a significant change to the state’s existing legal landscape by allowing Purdue Global students to sit for its bar exam as part of a change to the court’s admission and discipline rules.

The rule change went into effect that July, but since the bar exam is only offered in February and July, students couldn’t sit for the exam until the following winter. The wait, however, was worth it: Five Purdue Global students took the exam and passed, making them the school’s first students to be admitted to the Indiana bar.

As Purdue Global students continue to serve Indiana in growing numbers, law school leaders are now thinking bigger, looking for ways to integrate their students into the state’s legal community while supporting their own communities along the way.

Achieving student success

Purdue Global Law School is not accredited under the American Bar Association due to an ABA rule that limits the number of online learning hours law schools can offer. As a result, the school must seek bar exam accreditation on a state-by-state basis.

The school received its first state accreditation approval in California in 2020, followed by Indiana in 2024 and Connecticut shortly after. Right now, graduates who earn a law license in one of those three states can also apply to sit for the bar exam in North Carolina and Wisconsin. Beginning this September, Purdue Global students will be able to take the bar exam in Washington state.

Since earning accreditation status in Indiana, students at Purdue have seen consistent success on the exam: of the 19 students who’ve taken the exam so far, 14 have passed.

Purdue Global Law School Dean Martin Pritikin credits the success to both the students’ work ethic and how the school designs its coursework to support student learning.

“We’ve worked very hard to align our teaching and our curriculum and our academic support to give our students and graduates the best chance possible of success,” he said.

The law school’s curriculum relies heavily on faculty collaboration. Unlike traditional law schools, whose faculty are encouraged, but not required, to coordinate course elements like written assignments and exams, faculty at Purdue Global intentionally build a curriculum that integrates legal concepts across classrooms, Pritikin said. To accommodate students’ obligations both in and out of school, faculty also try to stagger deadlines for papers and exams.

As an online law school, Purdue Global is uniquely positioned to reach communities all over the state, particularly those hurting most due to the state attorney shortage. Last school year, 160 Purdue Global students were based in Indiana, and of that number, 29% lived in rural counties. Armed with these numbers, the school has developed specific courses to teach students how to serve the rural communities they live in, through courses like its rural law and virtual law practice courses.

In rural areas, lawyers are often small businesses, Pritikin said.

“You need to understand how to manage overhead; you need to understand client intake and billing and all these things that isn’t really classically part of a traditional law school curriculum,” he said.

Pritikin sings high praise for the students and their ability to chart their own success. He emphasized that these students don’t enroll in the online curriculum simply because they couldn’t get into a traditional brick-and-mortar school.

“Usually they’re juggling us on top of a full-time job and often family care responsibilities, so they have to be very disciplined,” he said.

Looking ahead

As the school continues to expand its presence across Indiana, leaders are looking at how the school can enhance its offerings to accommodate new expectations in the legal community, including the integration of artificial intelligence. Right now, the school is developing a guide to help students understand how AI can be used for studying. Pritikin is also interested in integrating AI into classes, including assigning students with building AI prompts and learning how to interact with them.

“You have to have writing skills in order to be able to edit and correct the output of AI,” he said. “If a student submits something and says, ‘I submitted it to AI and everything was 100% great, so I didn’t have to change anything.’ It’s like, ‘Well, I can read what the AI put out, and it wasn’t 100% great.’”

May is grateful for how Purdue Global serves its students, both in and out of the classroom. After passing the bar exam this year, he now works for Crown Point-based Robbins and Seville LLC, where he said he’s already seen the fruit of his education take shape. His experience in the classroom recently came into play in the courtroom.

“I’ve had hearings on motions that have come up, and I’ve been able to pull and utilize from that class,” he said. “You kind of know what you’re looking for and what’s to be expected, and then when you step into the courtroom for the first time, you’re like, ‘Oh, hey, this is almost exactly like the trial advocacy course.’ That was a plus.”

Looking ahead, Pritikin is hopeful the school can soon earn ABA accreditation nationwide. Shortly before Indiana approved Purdue Global’s access to the state bar, the ABA was considering updating its rules to allow all online schools to apply for accreditation. Pritikin continues to urge the organization to move forward with the change, but so far, its standards remain the same.

In the meantime, Pritikin is motivated to continue applying on a state-by-state basis.

The school continues to grow, with 1,000 law students across the country enrolled last school year. Pritikin anticipates that as the school continues to produce well-rounded lawyers, the stigma around what it means to be an online school will change. Instead of looking at online schooling as “second-best,” students and peers in the legal community will view Purdue Global on equal footing as other law schools around the state and country.

He hopes Purdue can be a driving force in expanding access to legal services across Indiana.

“When you make legal education more accessible and affordable, you make legal services more accessible and affordable, especially in rural areas,” he said. “That’s really the transformation that I’m looking to see. And my hope is, we look back five years from now and see these big differences and see that Purdue Global was sort of the cutting edge of that.”•