Hawaiʻi is facing a new shortage — of lawyers.
With fewer and fewer attorneys practicing in Hawaiʻi, a new task force established by the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court aims to address worrying trends in legal representation in the state.
The task force convened for the first time in May. Its leaders say the profession is experiencing ‘brain drain,’ an aging workforce, and key gaps in practice areas.
To learn more, HPR spoke with the co-chairs of the task force: Mark M. Murakami, who was the former president of the Hawaiʻi State Bar Association and currently practices at the Damon Key law firm, and Justice Todd Eddins, an associate justice on the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court.
Interview Highlights
On Hawaiʻi’s lawyer shortage
JUSTICE TODD EDDINS: There's real shortages as far as distribution of lawyers in our state. There are shortages of some practice areas, for example, rural and neighbor islands have a decreased amount of lawyers, and it's been flatlining really over the years, quietly but thinly … and that compromises access to justice to our courthouses, because access to a lawyer is not a luxury. Rights are enforced. Rights are not real unless a lawyer is there beside someone when they enter the courthouse.
MARK M. MURAKAMI: It's a little trite, because you know Shakespeare talked about in “Merchant of Venice,” right, ‘get rid of all the lawyers as a good thing for society.’ However, if you're facing a DUI charge, if you're facing a felony charge, you better darn well have a competent, qualified private defense attorney or public defender for you to navigate that huge event in your life. A divorce attorney, a lot of folks get divorced, and you need to have both spouses represented in order to make a very painful exposure to the legal system as competent and qualified and straightforward as possible. And so those require human beings, and those require licensed, qualified attorneys, and we just aren't generating enough of them.
On why Hawaiʻi is seeing a lawyer shortage
MURAKAMI: There's a long lead training path…you have to go to undergrad, there's a three-year law school. A good chunk of folks go to the marketplace or school teachers decide they really want to be a lawyer, and then come in. And so, usually you don't start your legal career until your early 30s, and you usually work into your 60s or 70s. You probably can work a little longer, but you really don't hit the sweet spot in terms of your professional career … until your late 40s, early 50s. That's kind of your sweet spot professionally, and so because of that, I think we as a profession have to look backwards and make sure that the younger generation has enough numbers to flow through the system to cover all the legal needs that Hawaiʻi has.
On the new legal task force to address the shortage
EDDINS: Our task force is mainly focused on the lawyer shortage and the pipeline, and increasing that pipeline for new lawyers, and there's a lot of ways you can do that. Mark and I have been thinking along the lines of not just college students and those who are actually progressing law school, but digging into high school students and getting them very interested in the law. There's great civic education programs that the judiciary is implementing, and we have mock trials in the high schools, which is just a greatly, highly successful program over the years. … I judge it every year, and I just see the enthusiasm and the energy of our high school students, and it's really refreshing and heartening to see all that … so there's those types of things we can do to address the shortage. And our task force, which is just a bunch of outstanding lawyers, judges, [a] broad cross section of of our state's brilliant judicial minds and legal minds is going to be looking at everything on the table to try to just see what we can do about addressing the issue.
This story aired on The Conversation on June 10, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
