Number of Lawyers in Ga. Legislature Hits Record Low

Kade Cullefer, director of state affairs with Troutman Pepper Locke’s Troutman Strategies team, was quoted in the November 6, 2026, Daily Report article, “Number of Lawyers in Ga. Legislature Hits Record Low.”

• Lawyer and lobbyist Kade Cullefer, director of state affairs at Troutman Strategies, noted that having nonlawyers on the House and Senate judiciary committees isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In his view, while something is lost when there are fewer attorneys in the room, it’s also healthy to have a diverse set of expertise among the legislators. Moreover, these lawmakers still have legal support by way of the Office of the Legislative Counsel, a group of staff lawyers responsible for helping lawmakers with drafting and legal research.
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• Cullefer agreed that lawyers bring a specific skillset to the table.
• “With fewer lawyers [there are] fewer eyes,” Cullefer said. “I used to sit in the House Judiciary Committee years ago. [When] the lawyers on that committee would attack a problem, they might have been on other sides of the aisle, but they wanted to get the grammar right, because they know that the position of a comma matters; a semicolon matters.”
• Not having those eyes “can create problems down the line,” Cullefer continued. “Especially when you zoom out and think about companies or businesses that are relying on that law the way that it’s written, and then it changes in wholesale because it was maybe vaguely worded … So the court comes in and interprets it in a way that … isn’t exactly in the spirit of what they tried to pass … and companies have to really react quickly to make changes in how their processes work.”
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• Georgia’s legislative session may only last 40 days on paper, but Cullefer said that a legislator’s work is more of a “full-time, year-round job.”
• “You’re running for reelection every two years. You’ve got committee hearings or study committees in the off-season and other types of legislative meetings. And then you’ve got constituent services calls and other issues that never stop,” Cullefer said.
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• Cullefer said that lawyer legislators also typically end up in leadership positions, which tend to be even more time-consuming.
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• According to Cullefer, historically a Georgia lawyer typically worked in a small town as a general practitioner who either operated their own law firm or had a small partnership. These lawyers set their own billing schedules and had more control over their work hours. However, as legal practices have consolidated into regional and national firms working on a billable-hour model, the number of those small-town practitioners has gone down.
• “Lawyers aren’t able to afford to leave,” Cullefer said. “And so, if you’re expected to bill a certain number of hours for the year and be compensated based on that, you can’t take a quarter or a third of the year to go and legislate at the State Capitol and still expect to get paid the same amount as your colleagues who are billing whatever that threshold number is. … You can’t back fill that missing time when you’re at a large law firm.”
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• Moreover, “companies don’t necessarily want their lawyers voting on issues at the General Assembly that might directly impact their industry,” Cullefer said. On the other hand, he also predicted that the number of lawyer legislators who work at practices operating on a contingency basis, particularly personal injury, may go up in the coming decade.
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• “You could almost do this piece as an advertisement for lawyers in the legislature because it just continues to dwindle,” Cullefer told Law.com