It is December, you are three hours short, and the only course you attended this year was accredited in Texas. The good news is that this is usually solvable. The surprising part is that the first question is not which state you are licensed in — it is whether the session you sat through was live.
I am licensed in Texas and, since August 2026, in Georgia as well. Two jurisdictions means two sets of rules, two compliance calendars, and a fairly rapid education in how differently states treat a course that somebody else accredited. What follows is what I found when I went through the primary sources rather than the CLE vendors’ explainers.
One caveat before any of it. This is a summary of publicly published rules as of August 2026, not advice about your obligations, and CLE rules change frequently. Confirm anything you plan to rely on with your own bar.
There are four ways a state can treat an out-of-state course
Almost every situation falls into one of four buckets.
Reciprocity, sometimes called presumptive approval. The state accepts a course because another mandatory-CLE jurisdiction accredited it. Nobody files anything.
Attorney application. The state has no reciprocity, but lets you personally submit the course, usually after the fact, with a form and a fee.
Provider-only. The state will accept an application, but only from the provider. You cannot cure this yourself, which is why it is worth knowing before you attend rather than after.
No requirement. A few jurisdictions have no mandatory CLE at all.
The format question comes first
This is the part that catches people, and it is why I have put it ahead of the state-by-state detail.
A large number of the routes above are limited to live programs. Illinois is the cleanest example: its MCLE Board states plainly that there is no option for an attorney to apply for Illinois credit for a recorded course. Live in-person and live audio or video, yes — regardless of where the speaker or the participant is sitting. A recording, no.
Ohio splits the same way but draws the line differently. An attorney may file its Form 6 for live in-person programs presented outside Ohio. Everything delivered by technology — on-demand, live webcast, teleconference, live interactive webinar — is classified as self-study, and Ohio states that only sponsors may apply for accreditation of self-study activities. Attorneys may not apply on their own behalf.
Colorado permits individual accreditation for a live out-of-state program, and expressly bars it for home study. Kansas allows an attorney to apply for live programs including live webinars, but requires prerecorded programming to be submitted by the provider. North Carolina permits an individual member application for out-of-state programs but requires online program applications to come from the sponsor.
The practical consequence is simple. If you have a choice between attending a session live and watching the replay later, and you need the credit in a state that did not accredit the course, attend it live. The replay is often worth less than nothing for compliance purposes.
States that will simply credit it
These accept a Texas-accredited course without a new application, subject to the conditions noted.
| State | Condition worth knowing |
|---|---|
| California | Texas appears on the approved-jurisdictions list, and neither the provider nor the attorney needs to submit the activity for approval. The attorney must be physically outside California while attending; electronic or self-study taken inside California needs California approval regardless of where the course originated. |
| New York | Texas is on the approved-jurisdiction list in Group B, which means you must retain the written materials. Non-traditional formats require the sponsor to independently verify attendance, and where a sponsor cannot do that, the course will not be accredited. |
| Hawaii | Texas is on the approved-jurisdiction list. Credit is available for courses attended outside Hawaii. |
| New Jersey | Accepts credits for courses accredited in another mandatory-CLE jurisdiction, one for one, with no fee. New Jersey’s own format rule still applies: at least half your credits must be live with an instructor present. |
| Alaska | Any activity approved by a jurisdiction that requires CLE is approved in Alaska. Members self-track and nothing is submitted to the bar. |
| Wisconsin | Rule SCR 31 approves courses approved by, and attended in, another state. That “attended in” clause is doing real work — a Texas-accredited webcast watched from Wisconsin is arguably outside it. |
| Florida | Accepts an out-of-state transcript for credits granted by another state bar where the activity meets Florida’s accreditation standards. |
| Connecticut | Has no accrediting body and no pre-approval at all. Qualifying courses may come from any bar association or legal education provider, and the attorney self-certifies annually. |
Worth flagging: several states commonly listed as reciprocity states in vendor guides are not, on their own rules. Colorado and Montana both require a filing. I could not verify a reciprocity rule for Arkansas, West Virginia, North Dakota or Washington from any primary source, so I would not assume one.
States where you file it yourself
The fee is usually trivial. The deadline is what catches people.
| State | Fee | Deadline and limits |
|---|---|---|
| Illinois | $15 per course | Live in-person or live audio/video only. No route for recordings. |
| Colorado | $15 per Form 1B | Live out-of-state only. May be filed before or after. No individual accreditation for home study. |
| Oklahoma | $15 | Within ninety days of the program or December 31, whichever comes first. No cap on distance learning. |
| Ohio | $25 | Within sixty days. Live in-person only for attorney filings. |
| South Carolina | $25 per course | Uniform application. Compliance report due March 1. |
| Virginia | $25, or $50 if filed more than ninety days after | File by December 15 for courses completed by October 31. Requires seven to ten pages of written materials. Approval is valid only for the attorney who applied. |
| Tennessee | $2 per hour | Attorney may seek accreditation where the provider has not. |
| Pennsylvania | Not published | Location of the activity is irrelevant; board approval is what matters. Six distance-learning credits maximum. |
| Nevada | Not published | The only route I could find requires filing thirty days before the program. No after-the-fact path located. |
Maine, Montana, Missouri, Utah, Louisiana and North Carolina all provide an individual application route as well, with varying fees and conditions I could not fully verify from primary sources.
Virginia deserves its own paragraph
Virginia is the strictest jurisdiction I looked at, and it says so itself. The Virginia State Bar states that Virginia does not have reciprocity with any other state, and that approval of a course in one or more states does not guarantee approval of the same course in Virginia.
Approval is granted per attorney rather than per course — an approval obtained by one attorney does not help a colleague who attended the same session. The application requires an agenda with the sessions you attended marked, and seven to ten pages of written materials from those sessions, organized and labeled. Distance learning additionally requires a compliance form that only the sponsor can complete. Processing can take up to ninety days.
If you are licensed in Virginia, plan for this rather than discovering it in December.
Four jurisdictions where there is nothing to file
Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, Maryland and South Dakota currently have no mandatory CLE requirement. The District of Columbia does require attorneys admitted after July 1, 1994 to complete a course on the D.C. Rules of Professional Conduct within twelve months of admission, but that is a one-time obligation rather than an annual one.
South Dakota is the one to watch. Bar members voted roughly sixty-five percent in favor of a mandatory requirement in June 2025, and a proposal contemplating twenty hours every two years beginning in 2027 is with the state Supreme Court. No rule has been adopted.
What to ask any CLE provider for
Whichever route applies to you, the application will ask for documents most providers do not send unless you chase them. Ask for all of this at the time, not in December:
- A signed certificate of attendance showing your name, the course title, the date and the number of hours.
- A timed agenda. Ohio’s form asks for times of day, not just length of time. Florida asks for a detailed timed outline. An agenda that says “three hours” will not satisfy either.
- Faculty names and credentials.
- The course description or brochure.
- Written course materials. Virginia requires you to submit seven to ten pages; New York requires you to retain them.
- The accrediting state’s course number and the hours broken out, with ethics separately.
- Total instructional minutes rather than hours. Illinois converts from fifty-minute hours to sixty-minute hours and rounds down; Florida uses a fifty-minute hour. Minutes let any state do its own arithmetic.
- For anything delivered by webcast, written confirmation of how attendance was independently verified. New York will refuse accreditation outright where a sponsor cannot verify it.
The short version
Attend live where you can. Collect the paperwork the same week, not at year end. Check your own state’s rule before you assume either that credit transfers automatically or that it does not.
And if your provider cannot produce a timed agenda and a total in minutes, that tells you something about how many out-of-state attorneys they have actually helped.
How we handle it
Our monthly CLE is accredited by the State Bar of Texas through LexCollective. We are not accredited by any other state bar and will not describe ourselves as nationally accredited, because several states expressly prohibit a provider from claiming accreditation it does not hold.
What we do instead: we run the sessions live, because that is what keeps the most routes open for members licensed elsewhere, and we send the full documentation packet within a week of every session. The detail is on the CLE page.
