Strict Rules Limit Paraprofessional Ranks In Legal Deserts

Veronica C. Gonzales was part of the first class of legal paraprofessionals licensed to practice in Colorado in 2024.

Gonzales, along with 62 of her fellow applicants, was licensed to help clients with divorces, child support modifications and other family law issues, which she now does at Juniper Family Law LLC.

"There are clients that we are able to serve that in reality wouldn't be able to hire attorneys," Gonzales told Law360 Pulse.

But as helpful as Gonzales and her paraprofessional colleagues can be for clients who can't find or afford attorneys, there are nowhere near enough of them — either in Colorado or the five other states that currently have similar programs on the books, which have had difficulties scaling up nascent state licensing programs and getting paraprofessionals to rural areas is limiting their impact.

Those first 62 licensees in Colorado "were pretty much all of the experienced paralegals in family law. We all took the test and got licensed at that point," said Gonzales, who chairs the Colorado Bar Association's Licensed Legal Paraprofessional Committee and the Denver Bar Association's LLP Division. "Then the numbers started dropping dramatically," Gonzales said, noting it dropped "to 18, then about 25."

States with legal paraprofessional programs have difficulty drumming up applicants, primarily due to strict licensing requirements and lackluster marketing, according to program administrators. Some states have licensed just a few dozen paraprofessionals.

And when these paraprofessionals are licensed, the vast majority are located in metropolitan corridors. So, they don't solve the problem of rural legal deserts, which the American Bar Association defines as counties with fewer than one attorney per 1,000 residents. There were 1,300 such counties in the U.S. in 2020, according to the ABA.

"Scaling it is the biggest challenge that we face," said Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Paul Thissen about the program in his state, which has licensed just 42 paraprofessionals. "The clients that are now being served are being served very well. I would just like there to be more of them."

The Scale of the Problem

A total of seven states have implemented limited legal paraprofessional licensing programs since Washington became the first to do so in 2015, according to the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver.

Washington sunset its program in 2020, leaving six states — Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Oregon and Utah — currently operating initiatives. Ten other states are considering launching programs, according to IAALS.

Legal paraprofessionals — also called licensed legal paraprofessionals, licensed paralegals or limited license legal technicians, among other monikers — are licensed by the state bar to provide basic legal assistance to clients who cannot find or afford an attorney in areas where there are often too few lawyers to serve the community.

The American Bar Association estimates that there are nearly 1,300 counties, or roughly one-third of all the counties in the U.S., where there is one or no attorney per 1,000 residents. The consequences are far-reaching, affecting both the local economy and the well-being of rural communities.

The programs differ from state to state, but most licensed legal paraprofessionals can provide advice, assist with filing documents, communicate with another party's representatives and offer limited courtroom support in certain practice areas, most commonly family law, debt collection and housing disputes.

"These are individuals that can make a real difference in people's lives, and it can provide a way for individuals to grow a career and grow a business and do real fulfilling work," said Emily Lee, general counsel for admissions at the Utah State Bar, which began its Licensed Paralegal Practitioner Program in 2018.

"There's no question that it's reduced the justice gap in Minnesota. There are more than 10,000 clients who've been helped at this point who would not otherwise have gotten legal services," Justice Thissen said of the Legal Paraprofessional Program in Minnesota.


But while these programs have been successful at chipping away at the justice gap around the edges, they are unable to make more meaningful progress due to the small number of legal paraprofessionals.

"I would be surprised if there are 500 independent licensed paralegals in the country," said Rebecca L. Sandefur, a professor at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law. "It just has not been successful at growing."

Utah, for example, has approximately 55 legal paraprofessionals who were sworn into the state's bar, according to Lee. There are 42 legal paraprofessionals currently rostered in Minnesota, according to Rachel Albertson, chair of that state's Legal Paraprofessional Standing Committee.

Arizona and Colorado have had slightly more success. Arizona currently has 114 active legal paraprofessionals, according to Mark McCall, certification and licensing division director for the Arizona Supreme Court. Colorado has 126, according to Gonzales.

This can be attributed, in part, to the number of requirements to enter these programs, "they look a lot like lawyers," Sandefur said.

In Utah, for instance, licensed paralegal practitioners must have a law degree, a degree in paralegal studies or a national paralegal certification, as well as 1,500 hours of attorney-supervised legal experience within the previous three years.

Arizona's paraprofessionals need at least 24 credit hours of coursework specific to their practice area combined with a degree in paralegal studies or a paralegal certificate, 120 hours of experiential learning and one year of substantive law-related experience. Alternatively, they can be licensed if they have seven years of experience under the supervision of an attorney.

Those requirements are becoming harder to meet as fewer experienced paralegals have joined one of these programs, according to experts.

"It's very hard finding paralegals to work in family law who have any experience at all because all of us experienced ones have become licensed legal paraprofessionals," Gonzales said of Colorado. "So most of the paralegals that are stepping into the role have zero experience as a paralegal or zero experience in family law."

McCall has seen a similar dynamic play out in Arizona, where most of the early applicants to the paraprofessional program were experienced paralegals. But recruiting has since moved to universities with master's degrees in legal studies. As a result, it's become a challenge to find opportunities for applicants to gain the required work experience to become paraprofessionals, he said.

"Our people have shifted from the experience requirement to an education requirement in the last few years," McCall said.

State bars could also do more to promote the programs to applicants and the public, according to Sandefur.

Legal paraprofessionals are a completely new profession. So program administrators have to sell applicants on the viability of a new professional pathway and also sell the public on hiring them once they're licensed.

Washington's Supreme Court cited "the small number of interested individuals," along with the program's cost, when deciding to end the nation's first limited license legal technician program in June 2020. There were just 38 active legal paraprofessionals in the state at the time.


'Very Saturated in the Metro Area'

As few legal paraprofessionals as there are in these states, there are even fewer in the rural areas that many of these programs were established to serve.

The majority of Utah's LLPs are located in the state's main metropolitan corridor, which includes Salt Lake City, Ogden and Provo, according to Lee.

"When the program started, one of the issues that it was meant to address was this rural legal desert question: How do we reach those people?" said Lee. "And one of the challenges that we have faced is that most of these LLPs have ended up in this metropolis corridor. So we haven't really fixed or addressed that issue of legal deserts."

Many of Minnesota's paraprofessionals are similarly concentrated in the eastern part of the state, in and around Minneapolis-St. Paul, Albertson said.

Of the 126 legal paraprofessionals in Colorado, 98 are in the Denver and Colorado Springs areas, according to that program's annual report.

"We're very saturated in the metro area, for sure. There aren't very many on the outskirts," said Gonzales, who works in Arvada, Colorado, part of the Denver metro area.

In Arizona, too, legal paraprofessionals are largely concentrated near Phoenix and Tucson. McCall said it's a challenge to build representation in the state's more rural areas, such as along the New Mexico border and in Native American nations.

"The big issue that we're running into is getting folks to move out there, attorneys or even legal paraprofessionals," he said. "There aren't a lot of resources. There aren't financial opportunities for the kids. There aren't job opportunities for family members and spouses."

And the few attorneys in those more remote places tend to get all the legal work, making it difficult for new legal paraprofessionals to find enough work in those markets, Lee said.

"It's hard to break into those small communities," she said.

The Alaska Model

Alaska, through its Community Justice Worker program, trains volunteers who are already embedded in local, often rural community organizations, such as tribes, social service agencies and healthcare organizations.

These volunteers then provide basic pro bono legal help, primarily with public benefits, wills and debt-collection matters, according to Joy Anderson and Sarah Carver, co-directors of the Community Justice Worker Resource Center.

More than 200 workers have enrolled in one of the free online training courses the Alaska Legal Services Corp. offers in five areas, including Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, wills, Indian Child Welfare Act cases, domestic violence and consumer debt.

Those workers then volunteer to provide pro bono legal services to people in their communities. Seven full-time CJW program staff members provide volunteers with support, Anderson and Carver said.

The far lower barrier for entry — community justice workers don't have to have the years of experience or education legal paraprofessionals require — means those programs can scale up much faster, according to Sandefur.

"We've never had a problem recruiting people to the program," Carver said. "You can only get so many pro bono attorneys because there is a limited pool to pull from, especially in rural Alaska. That's not true for community justice workers."

The program has been successful, especially in helping Alaskans deal with their SNAP benefits, Carver said.

Between 2021 and 2025, Alaska's CJWs helped 2,800 Alaskans recover $23.6 million in supplementary food assistance, according to the American Bar Foundation's study of the program.

Between 2022 and 2024, the number of cases handled by CJWs increased 1,575%. By the end of 2024, CJWs were handling nearly four cases for every one case being handled by volunteer attorneys working with ALSC, the study found.

"This suggests that CJWs can scale up relatively quickly when compared with traditional models, enabling rapid deployment of help to more people," the study's authors wrote.

Seven states plus Washington, D.C., now have similar CJW programs, according to IAALS.

Arizona has two separate programs through which unlicensed volunteers help clients with matters related to housing, public benefits, debt relief, unemployment and domestic violence under the supervision of an approved legal services organization, according to McCall.

One of those programs is relatively new and is still ramping up, but volunteers with the other served 460 clients in 2025, providing over 767 hours of free legal aid, preventing 108 evictions and securing 32 orders of protection, according to the program's annual report.

It will likely take more than just one approach to address access to legal help, Carver said.

"The tide is definitely changing in the nation as a whole as to non-attorney legal advocates in some capacity," Carver said. "Everybody calls them something different, but we're all essentially doing similar work."

--Editing by Drashti Mehta.