Former NC IOLTA Board Chair Addresses Legislative Freeze on Grantmaking

Shelby Duffy Benton, a Goldsboro attorney and past chair of the NC IOLTA Board of Trustees, has addressed the North Carolina General Assembly’s one-year freeze on IOLTA grantmaking in an article published in the Spring 2026 issue of the North Carolina State Bar Journal.

The article, “In Defense of NC IOLTA, a Proven Model for Funding Legal Aid,” explores the program’s 40+-year history of funding civil legal aid services across the state and the impact of what Benton calls a “harmful funding freeze” on North Carolina’s legal aid landscape.

Legislation passed by the North Carolina General Assembly on July 9, 2025, bars NC IOLTA from grantmaking through June 30, 2026. Several North Carolina legal aid organizations have since announced budget cuts resulting in staffing reductions, decreased intake of new cases and office closures as a result of the loss of anticipated grant funding for 2026.

The need for those services in North Carolina is significant. As North Carolina’s 2020 Civil Legal Needs Assessment reported:

• More than 2 million low-income North Carolinians were eligible for the services of legal aid providers in 2018.
• Seventy-one percent of low-income families will experience at least one civil legal problem in a given year.
• There is only one legal aid attorney for every 8,000 eligible residents in the state.
• Eighty-six percent of these legal needs go unmet because of limited resources for civil legal aid providers.

Benton, who lives and practices in Wayne County — which is among the nearly half of North Carolina’s counties classified as legal deserts, meaning there is less than one lawyer per 1,000 residents — highlights the particularly damaging effect of these cuts on rural communities.

“These offices [in rural communities] provided critical legal services to low-income North Carolinians including veterans, seniors and survivors of domestic violence,” Benton writes in the article. “The difficult truth is that many folks in rural areas will have an even harder time accessing the legal help they need this year.”

NC IOLTA was established by the State Bar and the North Carolina Supreme Court in 1983. NC IOLTA has since awarded over $134M to organizations that help provide legal aid to low-income individuals, families and children in all 100 North Carolina counties. The funding comes from interest earned on a kind of general trust account that lawyers are required to maintain to hold client funds, called an IOLTA (Interest on Lawyers’ Trust Accounts) account, and supports civil legal aid at no cost to attorneys, their clients or North Carolina taxpayers.

In 2025, more than 40 North Carolina legal services providers and other organizations received $12M in NC IOLTA grant funding to support civil legal aid and improve the administration of justice across the state. At an Oct. 22, 2025, meeting of the House Select Committee on Oversight and Reform at which NC IOLTA Executive Director Mary Irvine and NC State Bar Executive Director Peter Bolac were called to testify, several committee members questioned the work of several recent NC IOLTA grantees and expressed concerns that the program had strayed from its mission.

Benton, a past president of the North Carolina Bar Association who served on NC IOLTA’s board from 2019 to 2025, disputes that characterization, writing in the article:

NC IOLTA grantees fight for disability rights; employment, health care and benefits access; safety and justice for survivors of domestic violence, victims of human trafficking, refugees and asylum-seekers; driver’s license restoration; custody and guardianship; consumer protections … The list goes on.

Here’s the bottom line: NC IOLTA grantees — attorneys, paralegals, advocates and thousands of members of the private bar who volunteer their time because they believe in access to justice for all ­— use the legal tools our lawmakers at both the state and federal level have created to protect the rights of North Carolinians and to allow them to seek redress when those rights have been violated.

That was at the heart of NC IOLTA’s mission when it first started making grants in 1984, and it hasn’t changed in the more than 40 years since. Indeed, the program is built upon the very bedrock of our democracy: equal protection under the law.

It is not known when or whether legislators might revisit the funding freeze; as of April 1, 2026, no further legislative hearings have been held or scheduled on this matter. North Carolina is currently the only state in the nation that does not provide funding for civil legal aid through IOLTA grantmaking.

NC IOLTA and State Bar leadership continue to work to preserve this critical source of funding for civil legal aid, which provides a lifeline for low-income North Carolinians in crisis.

Learn more and find the most recent updates on this issue on our Media Resources page. 

Stories exploring the impact of NC IOLTA funding are available on our Stories page. 2025 Grantee Highlights are being shared on our Grantees page.