Almost exactly thirty days ago, the Tennessee Supreme Court entered an order following up on its 2025 request for comment on a number of things that it was considering pursuing as options for addressing problems in Tennessee involving deficiencies with access to legal services and other problems such as the existence of legal deserts in our state.
If you missed any of my earlier content about any of this, you can catch up by reading here, here, and here.
For all of the potential that the Court’s proposals offered, however, the October 2, 2026 Order only did two things definitively: (1) expand the possible source of accreditation for law schools in Tennessee; and (2) decline to endorse any options for changing the rules on revising the ethics rules to permit ownership interests in law firms by (or to permit fee sharing with) people without law licenses.
Neither of those definite acts is going to do anything to help, much less cure, any of the problems the Court indicated it was so concerned about back in September 2025.
As to all of the other possible topics the Court said were under consideration, and with another year without solutions having passed, all we get are plans for the establishment of task forces. Two of the task forces (the “Interstate Practice and Mobility Taskforce” and the “Limited Licensed Court Access Assistants Taskforce”) can be assembled and be provided “additional directions regarding its activities” before the year comes to a close, but the other (the “Alternative Pathways to Licensure Taskforce”) though will not even be put together for until the Fall of 2027.
You can download a copy of the October 2 Order itself below.
Call me cynical, but I am even less optimistic today than I was months ago that our Court is going to actually undertake anything amounting to meaningful reform on these issues that could have been tackled with some velocity sheerly through the Court’s decision to exercise its own powers to revise rules.
With all of that being said, however, there is one meaningful (even if not perfect) action the Court took on the same day that it issued the October 2, 2026 order linked above. In a separate order, the Court made extensive revisions to Tenn. Sup. Ct. R. 7 – not all of which involved are things required by the decision to open up the potential for recognizing non-ABA accredited law schools). If you are interested in a full review of the revisions, you can get at those here.
For today’s purposes though, the most important change that the Court has implemented (and, based on my own experience in the last month has shown it is willing to have be applied retroactively) is that lawyers licensed elsewhere you pursue comity admission in Tennessee no longer have to show that they were engaged in the active practice of law for 5 of the 7 years preceding the date of their application. Instead, that “time in service” requirement has been reduced to 3 of the 5 years preceding the date of the lawyer’s application.
These revisions also helpfully expand what the rule itself says about how long a lawyer can undertake certain work pursuant to Practice Pending Admission registration. Until these revisions, the Rule had indicated that the maximum length of PPA was 365 days. Now, because the Board of Law Examiners has had a real problem of not getting around to granting comity admissions for applicants for well more than one-year, it has been true for quite some time that PPA status could be renewed for additional one-year periods. Among the many problems though was that applicants would not know that unless they asked or were represented by a lawyer who knew that could be accomplished. Now, with these revisions, there is no limit on the amount of time on a PPA registration.
There are, of course, so many other improvements that could be made both to the process for lawyers licensed in other states to become fully licensed in Tennessee and to permitting such lawyers easier ability to represent clients in Tennessee without having to obtain an additional law license.
Maybe, someday, the work of a task force will bring about those results but given the volume of, and detailed nature of, comments that already encouraged the Court to take direct action and gave them workable ideas for doing so, it is currently difficult to believe that the outcome of whatever comes from taking a year to just to decide to delegate the possibility of improvement to a “task force” level is going to have been worth the wait.