By Aaron Jones
I was recruited into the Young Lawyers Division (YLD) in a manner that did not particularly involve being asked. Steve Eckley, Iowa State Bar Association (ISBA) Past President and, at the time, shareholder at Belin McCormick, appeared in my office one afternoon and informed me that I was accompanying him to an ISBA event. I was a summer associate. The correct answer was yes.
A few years later another shareholder at my firm and YLD Past President, now-Justice Matt McDermott, suggested I consider following his path through the YLD presidency. I am honored to now do so.
I want to thank Manuel Cornell and Mary Rose Shelley, whose work on communication and community-building further contributed to the foundation of the YLD. Both genuinely made my year easier before it started. I look forward to building on their accomplishments.
A few weeks ago, we hosted the 2026 National High School Mock Trial Championship. Rather than recap the event, I want to focus on what it proved, not about mock trial specifically, but about this association.
When Olivia Brooks, Ame Mapes, and I took over the YLD Mock Trial Committee roughly six years ago, Iowa’s mock trial program was in a more difficult place than most of us wanted to admit. COVID cancelled the 2020 state tournament. Participation had dropped. Programs that went quiet during the pandemic had not come back. We bid on the national championship not because we had excess capacity, but because we needed a reason to make people remember why this work mattered.
It worked. The program returned to near pre-COVID levels, with new schools and communities involved who had never participated before. Attorneys across the state showed up to volunteer. Lisa Hanson, Malycki Mañon-Sosa, and the entire ISBA staff carried an operational load that, in fairness, may have exceeded what we originally described.
Here is what I take from that experience: the capacity in Iowa’s legal community is extraordinary, and much of it remains untapped. When we gave the legal community a reason to engage, people engaged. This is an insight that points to the work I think we should be doing next.
While staring down the barrel of an attorney shortage crisis, the best question is not “how do we recruit more attorneys?” It is “when, in a person’s life, do they decide whether becoming an attorney is even a possibility?”
In 2018, Gallup published a study commissioned by the Association of American Law Schools. The finding that matters most, and the one I cannot share too frequently: more than half of law students first considered law school before graduating high school. In other words, by the time a student walks into a law school recruiting event, the demographics of that room have largely been determined years earlier when somebody mentioned that being a lawyer was a real possibility: in middle school classrooms, in high school hallways, or around kitchen tables. That has direct implications for every present problem. Rural attorney shortages. Underrepresentation. Indigent defense. We tend to frame these as separate issues with separate solutions. But each of these problems shares a common upstream source: the pipeline into this profession narrows long before most people interact with it. A failure to open a door to Iowa’s youth at this pinnacle moment leaves our success on all these issues somewhat to chance. And the places with the fewest doors opened, not coincidentally, are the places which produce the fewest future lawyers.
There is a zero-percent chance I would have become a lawyer without mock trial. The path from where I was to where a lawyer stands is genuinely opaque. Financial aid, law school preparation, professional networks, none of it is intuitive without a guide. I did not have lawyers in my family. I had mock trial and the people it put in front of me. That story is not unique; it is the story of a significant share of the lawyers in this state. Our obligation, as the YLD, is to not leave that story to luck.
Mock trial remains as the most powerful civic education tool I know of; the success of nationals should be a launch point, not simply a high-water mark to look back on. But middle school and high school mock trial is a three-month commitment requiring coaches, resources, and infrastructure that not every community can sustain. If we are serious about the pipeline, we need more doors than one.
My primary focus this year will be an honest, structured look at what the YLD currently does to connect Iowa’s youth with the legal profession, where those efforts are reaching, and where they are not. The goal is not a new program for its own sake. We do not need more programs; we need a coherent picture of the ones we have, honest conversations about what is working, and a framework for filling the gaps we can reasonably reach.
This work will start in the YLD, but it cannot end there. Civic education, pipeline development, and community engagement are conversations that involve the senior bar, ISBA staff, the courts, our law schools, and county bar associations. I am genuinely fortunate in my timing. Stephanie Hinz steps in as president of the ISBA. She has more energy than most of us have on our best day, and she is a genuine believer in the YLD’s importance to the future of this association. I look forward to our year ahead. We want to build real, structured coordination between YLD leadership and ISBA officers that outlast both of our terms.
That last point brings me to a second priority, less visible but equally important: I want to leave the YLD more structured and durable than I found it. The institutional knowledge that accumulates should not walk out the door every June. Mary Rose and Manuel did meaningful work on this front. The communication cadence Mary Rose built, the action-item framework Manuel used to organize the Executive Council, and the quiet institutional memory they have both fought to preserve is why I can write this letter with ambition rather than triage. Building on their work will allow us to keep pushing in this same direction and ensure that future leaders of the YLD spend less time rediscovering how the machine works and more time putting it to use.
Yogi Berra put it better than I can: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.” That is the risk we run with every Iowa student who never gets a roadmap. The assumptions this profession has long relied on—that lawyers will come from lawyer families, that rural counties will produce rural practitioners, that the pipeline will roughly replenish itself if we keep doing what we have been doing—are no longer safe assumptions. They may never have been. The future of this bar depends on our willingness to reach further, earlier, and more systematically than we have before. And it depends on our willingness to take care of the lawyers who are already here while we do it.
I am grateful to serve in this role. I am grateful to the colleagues who pulled me into this work, and I intend to spend this year pulling others in the same way. If you see something we should be doing, a program that deserves more attention, a community the bar is not reaching, please tell me. That input is not a courtesy. It is the work we need to do. Let’s get to it.
Aaron Jones is an attorney with Belin McCormick, P.C. in Des Moines, where he practices in the firm’s corporate and commercial group, focusing on mergers and acquisitions and intellectual property matters. A graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, Aaron currently serves as incoming president of The Iowa State Bar Association Young Lawyers Division and is co-chair of the ISBA Mock Trial Committee.
