American Bar Association in Chicago.

Add Concordia University School of Law and Lincoln Memorial University Duncan School of Law to the list of law school fully accredited by the American Bar Association.

Both campuses ran into early accreditation problems and scrambled to ensure their first graduates could sit for the bar exam. But each overcome those challenges to win the ABA's full blessing in late February. Lincoln Memorial is located in Knoxville, while Concordia is in Boise, Idaho.

Lincoln Memorial Law dean Gary Wade acknowledged the school's rocky path to accreditation in a March 1 statement announcing its fully accredited status.

“This is a day of celebration for Lincoln Memorial University and especially for the Duncan School of Law,” said Wade, who is a former Tennessee Supreme Court Justice. “Over the last 10 years, our school has managed to hit a few potholes along the path to full approval by the American Bar Association, so success is all the sweeter.”

Concordia law dean Elena Langan called full approval “terrific news” for the school. “We have been working diligently toward this goal for several years and earning full accreditation by the ABA underscores our deep commitment to providing quality legal education and graduating students who not only become excellent attorneys, but leaders in their communities,” she said.

Both schools will be subject to a site visit by the ABA within three years, then will go on the 10-year reaccreditation site-visit schedule for fully accredited campuses, according to Barry Currier, the ABA's managing director for accreditation and legal education. With those approvals, the University of North Texas Dallas College of Law remains the only provisionally accredited school in the nation—a byproduct of the fact that no new law schools have opened recently amid legal education's downturn, Currier said. Five ABA-accredited schools have closed since 2017 or soon will close.

It took Lincoln Memorial, which opened in 2009, seven years to obtain full accreditation. The Tennessee Board of Law Examiners allowed the school's first graduates to take the state bar exam on the condition the campus get provisional ABA accreditation by 2012. But the ABA denied the school's application for provisional accreditation in late 2011 for what school administrators said were problems with admissions and academic support.

Lincoln Memorial responded by suing the ABA in federal court, claiming it “arbitrarily and capriciously denied” the school accreditation. A judge ruled against the school and it dropped the suit in October of 2012. Meanwhile, the state law examiners in 2012 extended the ability of graduates to take the local bar through 2017. But the school obtained provisional accreditation from the ABA in 2014, which allowed graduates to sit for the bar in the jurisdiction of their choosing.

Lincoln Memorial's run-ins with the ABA didn't end then, however. The ABA found the school out of compliance with its admissions standards in the spring of 2018, but determined it was back in compliance in November.

Concordia's road to full ABA accreditation also included various turns, though it never led into court. The law school opened in 2012 as part of the Portland Oregon-based Concordia University. The ABA's Council of the Section of Legal Education delayed a decision on the school's application for provisional approval in 2014 in order to allow a fact finder to visit the campus. That delay created uncertainty for the school's first class of graduates about whether they would be able to take the bar exam. The school had earlier asked the Idaho Supreme Court to step in to allow students to take the state bar exam, but the court refused. In the end, the school received provisional ABA accreditation in June 2015, which allowed the inaugural class to take the bar exam the following month.