Because service in the Illinois General Assembly did not come with enough perks already....

Reminiscent of the late Sydney J. Harris, here's a thing I learned en route to looking up other things....

Effective January 1, 2025, the Illinois Supreme Court has amended Supreme Court Rule 795 (CLE accreditation standards and hours), by adding a new subsection (d)(13), which provides:

Service as Elected or Appointed Member of the Illinois General Assembly. An attorney elected or appointed to the Illinois General Assembly earns three hours of general MCLE credit by attending at least one day of one qualifying legislative session. A "qualifying legislative session" is any official regular, special, or veto session of the Illinois General Assembly for which the member is present in the Illinois House of Representatives or Illinois Senate chambers or any official committee or subcommittee meeting of the Illinois House of Representatives or Illinois Senate for which the representative or senator is present. Credit for this attendance is limited to 3 hours for each qualifying legislative session and is capped at 12 hours in each two-year reporting period. There is no carryover of these credits to another two-year reporting period and no professional responsibility credit is available. The attorney must report the credit earned from this activity to the MCLE Board using the Board's online submission process no later than the reporting deadline for the reporting period in which the attorney earned the credit. Newly admitted attorneys do not earn Illinois MCLE credit under this provision.

It's not a complete get-out-of-CLE-free pass for lawyer-legislators: Hauling one's carcass down to Springfield and staying the day provides only a maximum of 12 of the required 30 CLE hours in any one reporting period (and only three in any given session) -- and the honorable member must still enter his or her attendance in the now-usual online manner (the dozen hours are not assumed or automatically conferred). Moreover, these are general credits only, meaning attendance doesn't count toward the various professional resopnsibility hours requirements.

Still... was there really a burning need for this? Were significant numbers of lawyer-legislators working so diligently on the people's business that they were failing to attend to their own CLE requirements? One guesses that Someone Important must have asked for this... but FWIW does not have the investigative resources to find out who that Someone Important might be.