The latest on the rural lawyer shortage, nationally and in Texas

Stateline News by Pew published this piece on the rural lawyer shortage a few weeks ago.  Elaine Povich writes:  

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.

The story is chock full of details from several states, including South Dakota, which founded the Rural Attorney Recruitment Program a decade ago.  Here's a startling data point:

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.

Meanwhile, the Deason Center for Criminal Justice Reform at Southern Methodist University's Dedman School of Law published a brief on how the shortage of criminal justice practitioners is playing out in rural Texas.  An abstract for the brief follows a screenshot of some key data points:    

Texas’ rural communities urgently need more prosecutors and public defense providers. Many rural prosecutor’s offices cannot recruit and retain enough staff, so the Constitution’s promise of equal justice for all remains unfulfilled. This policy brief outlines three solutions to recruit more criminal lawyers to serve rural Texans: Educational pipelines, financial incentives, and rural public defender offices. Rural Texans deserve the same constitutional protections as their urban and suburban counterparts. With strong recruitment strategies, targeted incentive programs, and new rural defender offices, Texas can green its criminal law deserts.

And here are some key data points: 

• On average, Texas’ most urban areas have 28 lawyers for every 100 criminal cases, but rural areas have only five.
• In rural Texas, people charged with misdemeanors are four times less likely to have a lawyer than people in urban Texas.
• In 2021, no local lawyer accepted an adult criminal appointment in 65 rural counties. •
• The problem is getting worse. Since 2015, Texas has lost one-quarter of its rural defense lawyers and an untold number of rural prosecutors.

Here are the proposed solutions: 

1. Educational Pipelines. Texas should adapt its “grow your own teachers” model to recruit and retain rural criminal lawyers. Legislators should also fund rural criminal law pipeline programs and create post-graduate fellowships and incubators for prosecutors and defense providers.

2. Financial Incentives. Texas should create incentive programs modeled on the successful Physician Education Loan Repayment Program. Texas should also fund the THECB's program for rural prosecutors and expand it to include rural public defenders.

3. Rural Public Defender Offices. Legislators should allocate funds to create new rural public defender offices. They should also invest in research that identifies the rural areas with greatest current and emerging needs.

Lastly, here's an American Bar Association profile of a student at the University of Alabama School of Law, Emily G. Sims, who worked in Covington County, Alabama (population 37,570) last summer.  Sims writes in the first person: 

Covington County would perhaps appear to be an unusual location to fully maximize early professional connections and final pregraduation experience. However, summer 2022 in that rural community was more valuable than any job a big city could have afforded me.

Although overlooked by many aspiring attorneys, small-town law practice can be a rewarding and fulfilling career. The Finch Initiative at the University of Alabama School of Law aims to convey just that. Named after the lead character in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, the Finch Initiative provides law students the opportunity to spend part of their summer working with a judge in a rural Alabama community.

The objective of the program is to immerse law students into the life of a small-town lawyer and hopefully facilitate unexplored enthusiasm for a similar professional path. Having grown up in a rural area, I have always appreciated all that a small town has to offer; therefore, the Finch Initiative appealed to me from the start.

Don't miss the rest of these stories about law practice in rural places, from the deep South to Texas to the plains.