The town had no attorney. So the mayor earned a law degree.

Under a dull spring morning, several men drive John Deere mowers through the downtown streets of Bicknell. As they pass by local government buildings, they wave at the windows and continue forward, speeding into the Memorial Day weekend.

Bicknell City Hall sits in the center of the 100-year-old town, right across from a funeral home and empty concrete lots. Inside the little brick building, the town’s two-term Democratic mayor, who just recently graduated from the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law, still has law school books he needs to return.

By state metrics, Knox County, where Bicknell resides, is not a legal desert (defined as having just one attorney per 1,000 residents). But if Thomas Estabrook passes the bar this summer and gets his law license, he will be not only mayor but the only practicing lawyer in Bicknell, where just more than 3,000 people live.

“I think it’s an opportunity for me to give back to the community,” Estabrook said. “I think that’s something that I ought to do.”

Although legal professionals The Indiana Lawyer spoke with find Estabrook’s determination commendable, they also consider his story a clear sign that state and university officials must find new ways to address Indiana’s attorney shortage.

“It is hard to get to law school if you live in certain regions of the state, and that is on us as lawyers, as a legal profession, as legal education professionals,” said Justin Forkner, former chief administrative officer for the Indiana Supreme Court and one of Estabrook’s law school professors. “We’re the problem. It’s not the people trying to get to law school. It’s us.”

A civil servant

Estabrook, 40, has lived in Bicknell his entire life.

All three of the addresses he wrote on his bar exam application were within city limits, he said.

“I’ve never really had the inclination to want to live anyplace else,” Estabrook said.

Bicknell lies about 16 miles northeast of Vincennes, the Knox County seat.

What first started as some plots of land in the mid to late 1800s, the town became a growing hub for the coal mining industry. The town grew from 4,005 residents when it was first incorporated in 1907 to about 8,000 people in 1920.

But in the late 1920s, many of the early mines closed down. Many residents calling the closures a “death blow” to the town, according to Bicknell’s website.

Although the latest U.S. census estimates put the town’s population at just over 3,000, the city maintains it did not die — it just “changed directions.”

Before becoming the town’s mayor, Estabrook held several community-facing positions. In high school, he covered City Council meetings for the local newspaper; at 21 years old, he took office as a township trustee; and at one time, he worked at Bicknell’s 911 dispatch center.

He first studied political science at Vincennes University before transferring to Indiana State University to complete his bachelor’s in political science. He then obtained a master’s degree in public administration.

Estabrook dreamed of attending law school when he first went to college, but after scoring poorly on the Law School Admission Test during his junior year of undergraduate, he abandoned the idea for many years.

“I just moved on,” Estabrook said.

In 2016, he was elected mayor of Bicknell.

Estabrook had many ideas to move the town forward, but he said he faces skepticism from some of his constituents.

“I find that in small communities there’s sometimes an attitude of, ‘Well, nobody’s gonna do anything,’” Estabrook said. “You change minds by doing something.”

As mayor, Estabrook oversaw the demolition of more than 100 blighted properties and pushed for the development of vacant lots into new homes.

But not everything has been popular: Estabrook admitted the town has had to raise trash fees and utility rates to adjust to the times, but he’s still confident the town has changed people’s minds.

“I’ve always wanted to say that such a time comes when I leave this office that people will say, ‘Well, you know, when Estabrook was there, they did something,’” he said. “That’s what I hope for.”

Back to school

While running Bicknell’s day-to-day operations, Estabrook has run into many legal areas. From code enforcement to ownership and title issues to leasing matters, Estabrook has gained first-hand experience into the everyday, albeit more technical, aspects of the legal field.

After some encouragement from his city attorney, Estabrook dwelled on the idea of going to law school — but not without first waving it off as a crazy thought.

Although an increased income did play a role in his decision to pursue a legal career, Estabrook also considered familial benefits.

“I knew one day that [my parents] would be in a position, you know, they would, they would age and somebody’d have to take care of them, and I never wanted to be in a position where they were taken advantage of by anybody or anything,” he said.

Sometime in late 2020 or early 2021, Estabrook decided to commit to the cause, so he applied to McKinney — and was rejected. But that did not stop him.

As soon as applications opened in the fall for the next cohort, Estabrook reapplied.

After not hearing anything from the school for some time, Estabrook began to worry the school would deny him again. But when checking his application’s status, he found a seat deposit for $300 had been filed, confirming his spot for the next year.

“Now this is real, folks,” Estabrook said.

Right around the time his son, Ethan, turned 4 years old in August 2022, Estabrook began his first year.

As mayor during the day and law student at night — and husband and father at all hours — Estabrook immediately ran into his first and primary obstacle: distance.

He drove to Indianapolis four days out of the week for McKinney’s evening division, which amounted to about 800 miles a week.

“The school work and the reading and all that, like that on itself wasn’t too bad,” Estabrook said. “The distance was terrible, and I was trying to maintain some semblance of existence at work.”

But the City Council supported him through his efforts, and his professors also came to understand his circumstances.

Forkner, the former chief administrative officer for the Supreme Court, remembers the first time he learned about Estabrook’s day job during his first-year legal writing class.

“I was like, ‘Dude, why?’” Forkner asked Estabrook. “Why are you doing this?”

My town needs lawyers, Estabrook replied.

“It was profound,” Forkner recalled.

Changing the tradition

Estabrook emphasizes that he went to law school because he wanted to, not because he was coerced into it.

But as great as Estabrook’s effort has been, Forkner cautions that becoming a lawyer shouldn’t have to come to that, especially given the state’s current attorney crisis.

Forty-nine of the state’s 92 counties are considered legal deserts, according to the Indiana Judicial Branch.

Compared with the rest of the country, Indiana ranked 43rd worst for its rate of lawyers per 1,000 residents.

More than half of the state’s attorneys practice in Marion County and the seven surrounding counties, according to the Commission on Indiana’s Legal Future.

Although the judiciary and bar associations are taking matters into their own hands to tackle the issue, several legal professionals The Lawyer spoke with hold that a significant portion of the problem rests in the state’s law schools — or lack thereof.

“It’s not just a lawyer shortage,” Forkner said. “It is a law school shortage.”

In 2020, Valparaiso University School of Law, which called about 18% of practicing attorneys in Indiana in 2019 alums, closed its doors for good.

A few years later, McKinney, which produces the greatest number of attorneys in Indiana, adopted a hybrid program allowing students to attend half of their first-year class meetings in-person and the other half online.

“That meant that people from the corners of the state could see their way to driving to Indy twice a week and not four or five days a week,” said Llyod Wilson, a recently retired professor at McKinney.

Estabrook missed out on the hybrid program by one year, but after his first year was complete, he said the school permitted him to only take in-person classes two days a week for the remainder of his schooling.

No other law school in the state is using a hybrid program like McKinney’s.

Knox County Circuit Court Judge Monica Gilmore also emphasized the financial burden students face when exiting law school.

“I know that when people hear ‘lawyer’ they immediately think, ‘Well, you must be rich because you’re a lawyer,’ and they don’t realize that there is this buildup that comes with being a lawyer, that you don’t start out making a lot of money. You just don’t,” Gilmore said. “You don’t really consider yourself to have quote unquote made it until you’ve been in practice for three to five years at least.”

Back to Bicknell

While bearing the pressure of his numerous responsibilities and the draining distance to classes, Estabrook says he considered throwing in the towel his first year.

Estabrook remembered the nights driving the 115 miles back to Bicknell after classes, asking himself, “Why am I doing this? Why am I here?”

But it was Wilson, his first-year contracts professor and who he often confided in, who played a significant role in keeping him afoot.

“I didn’t want to lose a student like that, because that’s the kind of person who’s going to make a good lawyer and a good citizen in the future,” Wilson said.

After several years and many credit hours, Estabrook walked across a stage at the Indiana Convention Center and was donned a purple hood.

And now, he’s bored.

“There was always a thing out there, was this assignment, had to read this thing, had to be at this place, there was always something,” Estabrook said. “The something — minus studying for the bar — is gone.”

But now he gets to spend more time with his son, and he has even found himself playing a video game or two.

Before too long, he will likely be preparing for the 2027 election, in which he says he plans to run for mayor again. Estabrook views his law degree as something made possible by the voters who put him in office.

“I feel obligated to seek, to hold, to serve at least one term in this office with a law degree as a way to kind of return some of the favor,” Estabrook said.

If he passes the bar exam, Estabrook plans to pursue business formation and local governmental law — the primary needs of his community.

“It was always about Bicknell,” Estabrook said.•