New Mexico forms working group to address rural lawyer shortage

Law 360 reports today on an initiative out of New Mexico that seeks to respond to the rural lawyer shortage there, as well as to the lack of affordability of legal counsel to those who might be considered "middle class."  Here's the lede:

Twenty-one percent of New Mexico’s counties have five or fewer lawyers, and two counties have no attorneys at all. These legal deserts, a huge access to justice barrier, have forced the state court system to take a hard look at possible solutions.

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District Judge Donna Mowrer, who oversees courts in two counties that have just 58 total attorneys for a combined population of nearly 70,000 people, told Law360 that the inspiration for the idea came from Washington, which has allowed limited license legal technicians, or LLLTs, to help low-income litigants in family law disputes since 2015.

Mowrer sits in in the Ninth Judicial District, in Portales, New Mexico, population 12,280, not far from the larger and better known Clovis, population 38,962.  Together, the counties for which these cities are the seats, Roosevelt and Curry, respectively, are home to 70,000 people and 58 attorneys, which is not a bad ratio.  Some other data points in the story are more sobering: 

• one county has no lawyer (but a journalist from that county will serve on the working group)
• 51 percent of newly filed civil cases in 2018 had at least one party without an attorney, up significantly from 2011, when pro se litigants appeared in just 36% of civil cases.

Interestingly, the New Mexico judiciary seems to be viewing favorably a program to license paralegals.  The program they are looking to as a model, however, has not been terribly successful in Washington State, where it has been running for the past few years.  At best, only tepid success was reported to the California Commission on Access to Justice when we considered a few years ago the Washington program, which licenses "limited license legal technicians."  One big problem with the Washington program:  the state's law schools are unwilling or unable to divert (from the education of JD students) the resources necessary to support the training of the LLLTs.  In Washington, LLLTs are licensed to handle family law matters.  Utah recently adopted a similar program, and there the para-professionals handle only landlord-tenant and debt collection matters. 

Mowrer also commented on the access-to-justice challenge for middle-income and modest means clients, saying that "a key selling point is the notion that firms can actually have LLLTs in their offices to accommodate those who can’t afford a traditional counsel." 

She also pointed out that firms need not be limited by geographic area. Being based in a city like Albuquerque won’t necessarily prevent a firm from hiring a technician in a rural area.

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We don’t have extra attorneys in the rural areas, and we’ve seemingly priced even the middle class out of an attorney.

Given the relative lack of success of the Washington program (at least as presented to the Cal Commission on Access to Justice a few years ago), it'll be interesting to see how Utah's program fares and where the New Mexico working group goes.