On the rural lawyer shortage, from the Illinois Supreme Court

Mark Palmer, Chief Counsel to the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism, posted this a few days ago about the enduring rural lawyer shortage.  The item is headlined, "The Disappearing Rural Lawyer, Part IV: The Persistent Legal Desert Crisis."

I'll just include a short excerpt here: 

In previous installments of my “Disappearing Rural Lawyer” series (Part I, Part II, Part III), I have examined the alarming shortage of attorneys in rural Illinois and explored initiatives across the state and country to address this problem to better serve rural communities, from financial incentives for relocating lawyers to technology tools to easier cross geographical divides.

Legal deserts — vast geographical areas with minimal or no access to legal services — remain a reality for many rural Illinois residents. For them, finding legal representation might require traveling significant distances, taking time off work, and incurring additional expenses that make justice effectively inaccessible.

In installment IV of this series, I present the latest data on Illinois’ rural attorney shortage and consider what it means for access to justice in 2025 and beyond.
The numbers: A continuing downward trend

Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission (ARDC) data from November 2024 reveals that the rural lawyer shortage in Illinois has shown little improvement.

Of the 8,327 Illinois resident attorneys admitted to practice in the last four years, a staggering 7,625 (91.6%) are practicing in Cook County or its collar counties (Lake, McHenry, Kane, DuPage, Kendall, Grundy, Will, Kankakee). This leaves only 702 of those newly admitted attorneys to cover the remaining 93 counties in Illinois.

Furthermore, of these 702, only a portion serve in private practice. Many of these lawyers are drawn to essential, non-private roles, such as prosecutors, public defenders, and other government positions.

However, this means the pool of attorneys available for family law, estate planning, business matters, and other civil needs is even smaller than the already stark numbers suggest.

In comparison to previous years, the trend of the disappearing rural lawyer in Illinois is concerning: 

• 75 Illinois counties have five or fewer new attorneys (compared to 72 counties in 2021)
• 32 counties have no new attorneys whatsoever (compared to 33 counties in 2021)

While there’s been a slight improvement in counties with zero new attorneys, the overall concentration of legal talent in and around Chicago continues to intensify.

Readers can, of course, find many resources related to the rural lawyer shortage on this blog.