The Iowa State Bar Association is a vibrant, progressive organization that provides Iowa attorneys with the benefits of professional association with their colleagues. Its benefits include continuing legal education, practice aids, interaction with the judiciary and legislature, participation in reform of the law, and news regarding developments impacting the profession. The ISBA includes lawyers young and old, newly licensed as well as retired, residents and nonresidents (including military), active and inactive, lawyers in practice, and those working for business, government, and in other lines of work. In all, the Association includes approximately 8,000 lawyers and judges in Iowa's 99 counties and beyond. The Iowa State Bar Association also can lay legitimate claim to being the oldest voluntary state bar association in the United States, having been formed initially in 1874, four years before even the American Bar Association.