State bar requests adjustment to dues cap to avoid future insolvency

Without an adjustment to the statutory cap on bar dues, bar leaders say the Virginia State Bar faces becoming insolvent by the end of the decade.

Currently set at $250, the annual dues paid by active members to the VSB has remained flat since 2000, except for a four-year period following the 2008 financial crisis when dues were temporarily decreased.

But rising costs for the bar and changes in technologies have led to the bar requesting an amendment to the statutory cap on VSB annual dues.

As first written, House Bill 276, patroned by Del. Terry Kilgore, R-Scott County, would remove the statutory cap on VSB dues entirely but leave intact language that requires the Supreme Court of Virginia to “promulgate rules and regulations” on the dues to be paid. Kilgore’s office did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.

As the bill moved through the legislature, a divide opened between the two chambers on how to adjust the statutory cap. The House of Delegates passed
HB 276 unanimously as originally written, but the Senate Courts of Justice Committee balked at the idea of removing the cap entirely.

“If they’re running in the red, I’m happy to offer an amendment for an increase, but I’m not comfortable with voting to remove the cap,” Sen. Richard Stuart, R-Montross, said at the Feb. 18 Senate Courts of Justice Committee hearing.

The committee advanced a substitute motion to keep the cap intact but raise it to $350 — $50 more than the amount VSB President Brett Marston, an attorney with Gentry Locke, told the committee would be needed to avoid insolvency.

Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, who chairs the Senate Courts of Justice Committee, confirmed that as of press time, HB 276 was in conference between the two chambers and will be “worked out sometime” before the General Assembly adjourns on March 14.

“At the moment, there is a conference process into which the two houses will enter to try to reach an agreement, based on some conversations that we’ve had with leadership in each house, to try to reach a consensus number for the statutory cap,” Marston told Virginia Lawyers Weekly.

The plan right now, should VSB annual dues be raised, Marston said, is for a “modest increase” in dues paid in 2027, “probably in the range of $50 per active member.”

“We intend to keep running the bar as efficiently and effectively as we possibly can so that we provide the members and the public as much of the services that we possibly can within our mission, without having to have dues be higher than absolutely necessary,” Marston said.

STIR

During the past 25 years, with dues remaining at $250 for the majority of the time, Marston told Virginia Lawyers Weekly, the bar was able to build up a reserve of funds that made it unnecessary to increase dues during that time.

However, recent cost increases have led to the bar running a deficit for several years, as “the amount of money being brought in from dues and other revenue sources is well less than the amount of expenses that the bar has.

“We’ve been able to use the reserve fund to cushion those deficits for the last several years, and we have enough in reserve to do that for another two or three years,” Marston said. “But at a point in time sometime around 2028 or 2029, if things do not change in terms of the revenue side, then we would be in a situation where the bar would no longer have sufficient funds to operate as it needs to.”

Bar leadership has referred to the reasons for the increased costs as STIR, an acronym for salaries, technological changes, inflation and rent.

VSB Executive Director Cameron M. Rountree referred Virginia Lawyers Weekly to a column he wrote in the April 2025 edition of Virginia Lawyer, the bar’s monthly magazine, in which he made the case for raising the cost of dues.

“While increasing services to Virginia’s lawyers, their clients, and the public since the last dues increase, the VSB has been challenged with unavoidable STIR expense growth,” Rountree wrote.

Staff salaries represent the bulk of the VSB’s expenditure, noted Rountree and Marston. Salaries for staff members, who are state employees, are mandated by statute, with Rountree writing that the increase in salaries are “not met with concomitant appropriations of general fund revenue.

“Staff salaries, representing approximately 72% of VSB expenditures, have risen 56.5% since 2000,” Rountree wrote.

Changes in technology have also impacted the bar’s revenue. In his column, Rountree noted the 2023 overhaul of the VSB website, membership database and case management software as crucial changes. This overhaul led to more cloud-based services, with Rountree writing that a “strategic decision to license and customize software products to meet [the VSB’s] needs” was made.

“This ‘rent’ as opposed to ‘buy’ approach incurs ongoing licensing fees to remain up-to-date, upgradable, and secure,” Rountree
wrote.

The VSB has also seen “inescapable” impacts from inflation, which has impacted expenses related to travel, vendor services and supplies.

With rising costs, Rountree noted before the Senate Courts of Justice Committee that if dues had increased with the rate of inflation, the $250 annual due would be approximately $515 today.

Finally, the VSB has seen a 30% increase in office space costs over the past 10 years.

“Rent has gone up in most every commercial space around Richmond, but especially downtown and in the space where the state bar is located,” Marston said.

Rountree reiterated both that dues have not increased for nearly 30% of the existence of the 88-year-old state bar and that any increase, regardless of the statutory amendment by the General Assembly, has to be approved by the Supreme Court of Virginia.

“Much has changed in legal self-
regulation since 2000, and the VSB has not been ossified in millennium amber since then,” Rountree wrote.

Committee debate

Before unanimously voting to advance HB 276 with the substitute to increase the annual dues cap to $350, many members of the Senate Courts of Justice Committee weighed in with their thoughts on the cap.

Addressing Marston and Rountree, Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Harrisonburg, said he had “great confidence in” the pair and their administration.

“But we don’t know what’s going to happen five years from now, 10 years from now,” Obenshain said. “Just an open-ended removal of the cap, I think, invites the kind of growth that we have concerns about.”

Sen. Jennifer Boysko, D-Herndon, supported the bill as initially filed. “We come back every year, so if we did see that there was a problem that the Supreme Court was not managing responsibly, we have the ability to then put some guardrails on,” Boysko said. “We have to trust our judges and our bar association, and if they are asking us to remove the [cap] here, they can come back if we call them back to make a change.”

Kilgore added, “If you all don’t like it, I’ll bring a bill back. If there’s abuse, I’ll bring a bill back.”

During the committee hearing, Stuart spoke often about raising the cap to just what is necessary to ensure the bar remains solvent. In response, Marston noted the benefits of granting added flexibility for the bar.

“By having a cap on it, especially one that is that restrictive, it takes away the flexibility we have to bring forward increases, especially in a high-inflationary period,” Marston told the committee.

Sen. Glen Sturtevant, R-Midlothian, said, “Fifty dollars may be what they need to increase it by now, but if they haven’t come back in 25 years, if it’s the will of the committee to raise the cap, perhaps we need to do it by more than what they are asking for today to keep revenue on par with where they are now.”

Ultimately, HB 276 with the substitute passed the full Senate unanimously on Feb. 23. After crossing over to the House, the full chamber voted unanimously
Feb. 25 to reject the Senate amendments at Kilgore’s request, starting the process to put the bill in conference.

“At a point in time sometime around 2028 or 2029, if things do not change in terms of the revenue side, then we would be in a situation where the bar would no longer have sufficient funds to operate as it needs to.”

—Brett Marston, VSB President