12.5 credit hours per year, reported every year (june 30). Verified against the KY bar or court authority.
| Total CLE required | 12.5 credit hours per year |
|---|---|
| Ethics requirement | 2 hrs |
| Reporting cycle | Every year (June 30) |
| Online CLE accepted | Yes |
| Accreditation route | Approved (KY Bar CLE) |
Note: Verify current specialized components with the bar.
Kentucky requires 12.5 hours every year. Fifteen of the 46 mandating jurisdictions ask for more and 29 ask for less.
Kentucky does not carry a separate wellness or mental health category. Wellness and secondary trauma training is generally applied toward the general credit requirement here. That puts wellness training in the largest credit category bucket. Of the 51 United States jurisdictions, 16 recognize wellness or mental health credit specifically and 16 mandate bias or inclusion credit, which means most attorneys satisfy this kind of training as general hours.
Kentucky requires 12.5 hours each year, of which 2 are earmarked for ethics. That leaves roughly 10.5 hours each year that you choose the content for. Those are the hours in question.
A systematic review of the research found secondary trauma in legal professionals to be significantly higher than in mental health professionals, social workers, psychologists, and prison officers. Criminal lawyers scored higher than non-criminal lawyers, and judges higher than barristers. This is not a resilience deficit. It is dose response to material the job requires you to handle.
Exposure follows the material rather than the job title, and it is not only the attorneys and advocates who carry it. Immigration practitioners and the paralegals working alongside them take asylum narratives in detail and repeatedly, frequently with a client's safety turning on how completely the trauma is recounted. Firms, offices, and courts in Kentucky whose work runs through material like this carry more of it than a general commercial practice does, and their training needs differ accordingly.
These are competence issues, not comfort issues. They surface as missed deadlines, degraded judgment on live matters, ethics complaints, and the departure of lawyers a firm has already paid to train. If Kentucky is going to require the time anyway, it can be spent on the thing that is measurably breaking.
Kentucky requires 12.5 credit hours per year. Of that, the ethics requirement is 2 hrs. The reporting cycle runs every year (june 30).
Yes. Rules on self-study versus live or interactive formats vary, and newly admitted attorneys are often held to stricter requirements than experienced ones. Confirm with the accrediting authority before enrolling.
Kentucky does not maintain a separate wellness or mental health credit category. Such programming is generally applied toward general credit. Many states permit self-application of general credit using a certificate of attendance; confirm the process with the accrediting authority.
Approved (KY Bar CLE). Requirements change, so verify directly with the issuing authority before relying on any summary, including this one.
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