Lack of rural lawyers leaves much of U.S. without support
While the running joke may be that there are too many lawyers in the world, in many rural places in the United States, there are demonstrably too few.
Despite efforts in recent years by a handful of states, universities and legal associations to ease the problem, there remains a glaring lack of lawyers in many farflung places. This leaves those areas and their residents without easy access to legal advice for family issues, wills, estates and property transactions, in addition to any criminal or civil legal disputes. Residents often have to drive long distances to another city or rely on remote video meetings.
“That’s an access problem when you are asking someone to drive 100 miles or more to do a simple will or a simple divorce,” said Sam Clinch, associate executive director of the Nebraska State Bar Association, a state with few lawyers outside its largest cities, Lincoln and Omaha. Nebraska has a small state loan repayment program to help a few attorneys who agree to practice rurally; in a decade, the program has placed 39 lawyers in rural parts of the state.
Some 40% of all counties in the United States — 1,272 of 3,141 — have fewer than one lawyer per 1,000 residents, so few that they are considered “legal deserts,” according to the most comprehensive survey of attorneys available, conducted by the American Bar Association in 2020.
More recent smaller studies have shown no easing of the problem. An updated American Bar Association lawyer census in 2022 did not break down the attorneys by residence but noted that the overall number of lawyers has remained about the same.
And overarching numbers can be deceiving too.
Nationwide, there are roughly four lawyers for every 1,000 residents, but those numbers don’t mean much because so many lawyers are concentrated in cities. New York state has more lawyers than any state in the country (184,000), the 2020 survey showed, but rural Orleans County, New York, holds just 31 attorneys for the county’s 40,000 residents, about three-fourths of an attorney for every 1,000 people.
California comes in second in overall totals, but it too has counties such as Merced, with 0.74 of a lawyer for every 1,000 people.
The situation is far worse in rural states such as South Dakota, with few attorneys outside of urban centers such as Rapid City and Sioux Falls. South Dakota is one of the few states where the legislature and governor agreed a decade ago on a plan to attract lawyers to rural areas.
The Rural Attorney Recruitment Program has brought 32 new lawyers to remote areas in the state, according to Rapid City attorney Patrick Goetzinger, former president of the South Dakota State Bar Association, who spearheaded the program a decade ago.
Each attorney gets a stipend of $12,500 a year for five years if they agree to work in rural counties. The stipend, which is in addition to whatever they earn doing legal work, corresponds to what a year of law school cost in the state at the program’s inception, Goetzinger said. While many of the lawyers use the funds to pay off school loans, he said they are free to use the money any way they like. If they leave the program before five years, they forfeit the funds.
Goetzinger said in a phone interview that he and a group of attorneys went to the legislature and former Gov. Dennis Daugaard, a Republican, at the time because they needed “a funding source to attract civil practice lawyers to these communities. Money talks.”
The legislature agreed to fund half the program, while the communities kicked in 35% and the bar association the remaining 15% of the funds. The total cost was about $88,000 in fiscal 2021. “We felt if we get ‘em for five years, we got ‘em,” he added. Goetzinger said the program started with 16 lawyers, 10 of whom are still working in rural communities. The program is now authorized for 32 slots, and currently 26 are enrolled.
However, while the program has made an impact, the rural-urban attorney gap is still wide. The South Dakota Searchlight reported that 72% of all South Dakota attorneys still live in four cities: Aberdeen, the capital city of Pierre, Rapid City and Sioux Falls, while only 35% of South Dakotans live in those cities.