Rule allowing attorney education on cultural competency and bias reduction goes into effect in January

The Wisconsin Supreme Court hearing room. Photograph by Margo Kirchner.

By Alexandria Staubach
 
Wisconsin lawyers will soon be able to claim up to six credits for courses on cultural competency and reduction of bias within the legal system to satisfy the 30 mandated hours of continuing education every two years.
 
A new rule approved by the Wisconsin Supreme Court permitting the training will take effect for the reporting cycle beginning in January 2026. 

The rule stops short of mandating any course in the subject area, leaving it to the attorney's choice. 
 
At an open session following a public hearing in January, the Supreme Court justices voted to approve the State Bar of Wisconsin’s petition seeking recognition of continuing legal education credit for courses addressing cultural competency and reduction of bias.
 
The contours of the rule and when it would take effect remained outstanding until last week when the court issued its final order.
 
The order put to rest a years-long campaign for attorneys to receive such credits. In 2022, the Supreme Court rejected a previous petition for a similar rule change. At that time, Justice Rebecca Grassl Bradley penned a 33-page concurrence, writing that the State Bar was seeking to “mandate DEIA training, impose group think on attorneys, and condition bar admission and continuing licensure on subscribing to an illiberal political ideology.”
 
Bradley attached her lengthy 2022 concurrence to her seven-page dissent in last week’s order approving the new legal education credits.

In her dissent, Grassl Bradley cited authorities from Bob Dylan to Frederick Douglass to support her position that cultural competence and bias reduction education “inflicts particularly pernicious damage on the justice system." She wrote that “without any evidence, (DEI’s) adherents assert that race-based bias infects the entire system, precluding people of color from receiving equal protection of the law.”
 
Grassl Bradley asserted this was an “insupportable insult to attorneys and judges” and is “in derogation of every principle that makes America great.”
 
Justice Annette Ziegler joined the dissent. 
 
The January decision came with sharp criticism from Justice Brian Hagedorn as well. At the court's January open session he called the rule change “wrong-headed and likely counterproductive.”
 
However, although last week’s order noted Hagedorn's dissent to the outcome, Hagedorn did not join Grassl Bradley’s written dissenting opinion.
 
The rule change was also opposed by conservative advocacy group Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which, according to its January testimony against the rule, is generally opposed to continuing legal education.