This story was originally published by Stateline, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts.
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 far-flung 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.
While money is important because attorneys generally make more in larger cities, there are other factors keeping newly minted lawyers from settling in small communities, according to experts.
Hannah Haksgaard, professor of law at the University of South Dakota, said in an interview that if the “goal is to be a high earner, you should go to the big cities,” though she added that attorneys who do routine work such as wills and estates don’t get the big money no matter where they live. But there’s more to a lawyer’s lifestyle than money, she added.
While budding lawyers often express concerns about lack of access to cultural amenities, such as music and art in smaller places, “some people are concerned about access to ranches and rodeos,” she said. “There is a culture in rural areas that’s absolutely missing from urban areas. Sure, if you want to go the symphony, you’re not going to be in middle of Oklahoma.”
Other concerns include finding suitable employment for a professional spouse or having access to good public schools, but those issues are balanced by the ability to get courtroom experience early or having a real impact on the community, said Lisa Pruitt, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. She’s the lead author of an article titled “Legal Deserts: A Multi-State Perspective on Rural Access to Justice,” published in the Harvard Law & Policy Review in 2018.
Few other states have adopted South Dakota’s model because of cost and because rural residents in states with big urban centers, such as California, have less political clout, Pruitt said. North Dakota is an exception; it has a program modeled after its southern neighbor.
In a presentation made to a Rural Legal Access Summit in 2018 at the San Joaquin College of Law, Pruitt noted that while California and South Dakota have about the same number of counties (58 and 66 respectively), California has only three counties with a population below 10,000, compared with South Dakota’s 48 counties with that population. And when thinking about trying to offset the cost of law school, she pointed out that annual tuition in California averages just over $48,000 compared with about $15,600 in South Dakota.
“In California, it’s really hard to get the legislature or the state bar to get these various entities that could pony up some money to get lawyers to go to rural places,” she said. “In most states, the relevant institutions are not willing to do this because constituencies are not strong enough. It’s hard to get lawmakers or The State Bar of California to care about rural people and places because there is no power there.”
A search of the California legislature’s database turned up no bills specifically designed to address the issue over the past several sessions.
But California and many other states have some programs designed to familiarize young lawyers with rural life and work. In California, for example, the state has a $5 million program through the Judicial Council for the California Access to Justice Commission to give grants to nonprofit organizations that provide civil legal aid for people in need.
The bar associations in some states run national summer programs or fellowships in which lawyers spend time with rural firms.
Maine approved a bill just last year to authorize the University of Maine School of Law to open a legal aid clinic in Fort Kent, a city on the Canadian border, and funded it at $600,000, according to Senate President Troy Jackson, a Democrat who represents Aroostook County, where Fort Kent is located, and who sponsored the bill. No one testified against it.
In an interview, Jackson said while there was little opposition, some residents of other rural parts of the state thought maybe they should get a clinic too. That discussion was put off, but he expects others to make the case if the first program is a success. The funding came from some excess money in the judicial budget, and he said if the program is to continue past the first biennium, that may be a point of discussion as well.
“It’s up and going,” he said. “They are trying to walk and crawl and run at the same time.”
Without the clinic, there are only two full-time lawyers and one part-timer in Fort Kent, and one of the full-timers only does real estate work. “You often don’t think you want to have a lawyer, but often you end up needing ‘em,” said Jackson, a fifth-generation Maine logger, who said he sometimes wishes he had a law degree.
Nebraska’s program, the Legal Education for Public Service and Rural Practice Loan Repayment Assistance fund, last fiscal year paid 34 recipients between $1,000 and nearly $5,000 toward their law school loans if they work in designated rural areas, according to an email from Jeffery A. Pickens, chief counsel of the Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy.
Clinch, at the Nebraska Bar, said that in addition to the loan program, the bar association partners with three state universities to pay college tuition for undergraduates who express an interest in going to law school and in rural law.
“We hope they go back to rural Nebraska, but it’s not something they have to do,” Clinch said, adding that a survey of the students participating in the program showed that 70% grew up in a rural area. The association also runs bus tours to rural areas so students can meet with local officials and lawyers. “If we place one lawyer in one rural community that needs a lawyer, it’s a success.”
To entice them, he said, the program’s advocates talk about experience rather than money.
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“We tell them if you go to a big city and a big firm, you might see the inside of a courtroom once in two years,” he said. “If you practice in a small town or rural area, you’ll be in the courtroom in the first couple weeks and chairing a trial in the first month.”
Exactly. I don’t care for more subsidiaries for people who tell me how self-reliant they are. After all, rural folks don’t like “interference from St Paul”, they just want to be left alone.
Law is based on fact, not conspiracy theories, why would a lawyer want/need to work in the land of no facts and all conspiracy theories?
It’s almost as if the rural “lifestyle” is unsustainable without mass contributions from those not living in rural areas, “takers” indeed.
I think that it is safe to assume that ian does not live in rural county.
As someone who has lived in the Twin Cities and in a rural county (approx. population of 11,000), I know that there are benefits of living in a metro area that are different than the benefits of living in a rural area. For the most part neither set of benefits is considered good or bad, just different. Several times each year, I will travel to the Twin Cities for sporting events, visiting friends/relatives, or to hop on a plane to travel to another urban area. Similarly, starting on Memorial Day weekend, I see posts from my metro friends complaining about the traffic as they travel “up North” to cabins, resorts or other getaways. A huge impact of the lack of legal resources in Rural America is in risk protection for farm businesses and farm business transition / estate planning.
If someone in a metro area owned a multimillion-dollar business and didn’t have an attorney to assist them with business establishment, transitions, and risk management – we would all think they were severely misguided. Why should the businesses and families in rural America not have the same protections? Attorneys who specialize in Real Estate, Agricultural, and Probate laws are especially needed in Rural Areas. Here’s an example…
One thing that rural areas have in abundance is land. Especially “working” lands, meaning that crops and/or livestock are using that land. The products resulting from those plants and animals become fiber, food, and fuel that is shipped to urban areas to clothe, feed, and move (mostly) our urban friends.
According to the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), in 2021 (the most current year available), Minnesota’s Average Farm Size was 377 acres. (The total land in Farms for MN in 2021 was 25.4 million acres.) In 2022, NASS reported that cropland value averaged $6,200 per acre. What this means, is that without growing a crop, raising livestock, or having any buildings or improvements on the land – that average farm is a Millionaire with a value of $2,337,400.
But if it is a farm, that farmer has a home, machinery, buildings, barns, vehicles, etc. which each have their own values. Then you have the crops grown and the expenses of financing and operating a business, even family operated farms will have hired labor – so now you have employment law concerns. Add in the inherent messiness of farms being intertwined with families, the known health and safety risks of farming/ranching – let alone the worry of a substantial part of your equity standing in the elements in stormy Minnesota for 4 to 5 months of the year with no guarantee of production? Good, available legal representation is critical to ensuring a successful farm business.
I am thankful that several hometown “kids” have returned to this area to set up their law practices. These young professionals are a great start, but with several of their area counterparts nearing or having past retirement age, we need more to come home or come find out how rewarding life in greater Minnesota can be.
You miss the point entirely.
Yes, there are positives and negatives to wherever we choose to live. Rural politicians have run and been elected on a platform of division. Rural folks tell us how they’re heartier folk than us citidiots, and how we squander their tax dollars in lazy welfare cheats and light rail. We don’t mind subsidizing rural folks, hell we’re big government liberals!
What we don’t like is being constantly run down by rural folks, who We are subsidizing. Rural needs Metro, and Metro needs rural. You don’t have metro libs bashing rural folks at election time, but rural politicians constantly run us down.
Here’s the deal: if you want money for workforce housing do Martin Windows and Digikey can expand, and you want more daycare options, and you want more LGA, stop electing politicians who want to spend less money on those things. Stop electing politicians who own the libs by trying to pass bills to stop MPLS and St Paul from governing themselves, and start electing candidates who do things to help you.
You don’t have metro libs bashing rural folks at election time, but rural politicians constantly run us down.
Do you even read this site? That’s all I ever see
Calling out rural conservatives for hypocrisy is not bashing.
I apologize ian.
I made an incorrect assumption based upon your comment, which I interpreted as being flippant. I moved back to my hometown after graduating from the U of M in the mid 1990s. If I had graduated 10 years earlier, I would have probably stayed in the metro. Rural life was ugly in the mid 1980s – so I do understand why you relocated.
It was ugly in the late 90’s and the 00’s, and the 10’s, and now the 20’s. You are the exception, most of us never go back.
And Matt, most people would say good deal.
Aww Gerry, did you get a sad over your kids abandoning your nostalgic vision for your dead end life?
Agreeing with Ian above, completely.
On an accompanying article on Minnpost, head of Coalition of Greater Minnesota Cities, and mayor of Thief River Falls, Mayor Brian Holmerand said “a $30 million infusion into the Local Government Aid subsidy was inadequate”.
If we send that money and I guess we are, please…..someone (Brian?) please tell me what THEY will change on their end to resolve these problems. Otherwise, we send the money year after year and nothing changes. How intelligent is that?
South Dakota is named in the article above. Well knock me over with a feather. Kristi Noem is always telling us how great her state is for business compared to Minn. Can this not be so? Surely some young lawyers from the Federalist Society would heed her call and move there.
If we bail out rural areas that refuse to tax themselves to support their needs, all the while these folks run off to Sam’s Club while decrying how their downtown is dying, it is LONG past time to stop this nonsense.
I am tired of us “citidiots” repeatedly sending our tax dollars to bail out rural America where people only want to maintain the status quo of their freeloading ways.
Capitalism continues to concentrate wealth and investment in urban centers while draining it from rural communities. These are also policy issues. These trends in solely urban investments can be reversed if government chooses to enact reforms that redirect some of those investments to rural areas.
Yeah, but how do you get rural free market conservatives to push for big gubmint? Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.
Unbeknownst to most Twin cities residents; Not every rural MN resident is a MAGA type Republican. I live in a blue area of MN and hearing this Provencal Twin-cities rhetoric where you paint everyone as an idiot who should live in Mpls is pretty divisive and insulting. I should not have to live in the 7-county metro area in order to have basic services.
Tell that to your neighbors Jim, the rest of us are already paying for your services.
Jim, most of us are smart enough to take your point for granted. YOU should be smart enough to understand that blanket condemnations of rural areas aren’t necessarily meant to include folks like you. HOWEVER, it should also be noted that folks like you are essentially powerless to affect any sort of change in the areas you live, and as such need to realize that the realities of your position might necessitate being caught up in whatever object lessons might need to be taught to your rural conservative fellows to help them understand the fundamental flaws of their worldview.
Jim, I could have explained the difference between “a majority” and “all”, but you already knew that. Are you telling me that the bulk of rural MN and rural America are not fertile ground for politicians who espouse a small government philosophy? Right here on MinnPost, we’ve read about Dems running for office who get jeered in small town parades.
It is cognitive dissonance for the majority of your neighbors to continue to vote the way they do, and then tell us they want big government.
Yeah maybe, kind of, sort of. One thing folks forget, you can do sewer and water, electricity, broadband snow clearing, roads, etc. etc. etc. a lot less expensively in a metro or suburban area than in a rural area. (40-80′ of road frontage vs 20,000) Cost of infrastructure and market availability, work resources etc. etc. etc. Call it more tax payers per mile.
Well yes it does. However the built-in inefficiency you desire isn’t good for ANY economic system. The reason the money flows to where the people are is, its the most efficient route.
Unfortunately rural folk bought into the Republican politics of manufactured grievance hook line and sinker and have embraced that resentment and hostility so completely that they can’t even abide basic public health recommendations during a deadly pandemic. It was always just a matter of time before this culture war of theirs blew up in their faces. You can’t sit around throwing hand grenades into urban living rooms for decades without eventually triggering a response and you can see that happening in these comments.
The sad thing is that this mentality of isolation, alienation, and resentment is entirely manufactured. Liberals and urban Minnesotans are NOT any kind of natural enemies for rural folk, on the contrary. The logic of resentment and fear is self sustaining and inescapable, once you decide you’re surrounded by enemies instead of fellow Americans and Minnesotan’s grievance just feeds on itself. Fascists exploit this mentality to capture power and mobilize oppression, but why do people choose embrace fear and resentment? It’s actually a lot easier and less stressful to abide differences among people than it is to fear and resent those differences. I fear rural Americans have dug deep hole for themselves and I hope they have the common sense and decency to climb out.
The left simply writing off rural MN is self-defeating. The reason they have been losing votes in this region over the past 40 years isn’t over any culture war nonsense but rather the drain of capital from rural to urban centers. Rural wage earners with good paying jobs are not as susceptible to right-wing rhetoric.
The “left” isn’t writing off rural areas, they’re just responding to rural hostility. We’re still inclined towards sympathy and support, and we’re still footing the bill. To whatever extent the “left” is unpopular in rural areas it’s the rural areas and residents that are self defeating because it’s they who don’t have the numbers and votes at the end of the day. This is why rejecting electoral outcomes and disenfranchising voters has become the hallmark of rural patriotism. We can only hope that rural voters abandon their attempts to capture the political process and join our efforts to participate in that process. The liberal impulse is always to be compassionate and helpful, but liberals don’t have to tolerate open hostility and attacks.
That’s just bunk. Everyone one of the most influential conservatives in the tiny burg I come from is exceedingly wealthy.
A government program doing good, helping to meet the needs of the people, started by Republicans, in a Republican-leaning state.
Huh.
Yes, indeed, an expansionist Republican government. How interesting.
Based on several of the comments here which seem to of the ‘you live there, you voted for your politicians so your fault’ ilk, I can assume they’ll apply the same standards to everyone else equally.
For example, if you live in food desert in Minneapolis, then the solution is for you to move and stop voting for the politicians you vote for. If you live in Minneapolis and don’t have easy access to healthcare or affordable housing, then you simply need to move and stop voting for liberals. Poor schools or high crime? Just move and stop voting for Democrats.
I mean, that’s the same exact sentiment people are applying here and I’m sure they wouldn’t apply double standards that discriminate against people merely because of the location they live, right? Right? Tolerance and equity and compassion and all those other words that people like to bandy about as if they mean anything when one’s actions are contradictory to their words.
Dude, we metro progressives vote and pay for activist government, our votes align with our values.
Rural folks vote for small government politicians and the associated tax cuts (though the tax cuts are for the wealthy). The rub is that after telling us they want to be left alone, they want us to pay for their roads, their new water treatment plants, and housing subsidies for the employees of Marvin Window, Polaris, and DigiKey. If you call Dems socialists, don’t expect help from the gubmint.
Cognitive dissonance doesn’t sell very well.