The incompatibilities between the personality traits of lawyers and rural people

One of my uncles is a large, scary man. When he was younger, he regularly attended mixed martial arts events. On most occasions, he was approached by promoters and asked if he had ever considered becoming a fighter. As a young man seeking fortune, he instead set his eyes on what he was told was an extremely lucrative activity: a season of crab fishing.

This type of fishing can be a grueling endeavor. The crews who sign up for it usually expect to work long (regularly over 12 hours) days in freezing weather. With little privacy or connection to the world outside the boat, the weeks (sometimes months) they spend in the boat can really do a number on their mental health. My uncle thought himself perfectly equipped for this job. Alas, it was not the case. Before long, the loneliness and taxing nature of the job got to him. About 2 weeks in, he suffered from a panic attack. Forsaking his dreams of riches, he demanded to be done with the whole thing well before the fishing season ended. He got stuck with the bill for the helicopter lift off the boat.

The key thing my uncle failed to consider was his own personality. Despite his intimidating appearance, he is actually a very warm person who thrives on social interaction. He was not well suited for the life of an Alaskan crab fisherman. He now makes a comfortable living as a pest control technician here in sunny California. If you asked him, he would tell you that there is no amount of money that could have compelled him to stay in that boat for another second.

Several American legal scholars have brought up the issue of the lack of lawyers in rural areas. A common prescription to this issue is financial incentives for lawyers who commit to working in these areas for some time. Whenever such an idea comes up, I always think of my uncle, barely holding onto his sanity in a tiny boat on the Bering Sea.

The personality profile of lawyers has been the subject of some research. The research suffers from a lack of uniformity as to how personality is measured, a problem which permeates the field of psychometrics. The Big Five personality trait model divides personality into five factors (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) each measured along a continuum.

No single scientific paper collects data and analyzes trends on all five of the Big Five personality traits of American lawyers. Such papers exist for legal professionals in Germany and Israel. The cultural consensus on the Big Five personality traits of lawyers seems to be that lawyers are higher than the average person in openness (creativity and willingness to entertain new ideas) and conscientiousness (diligence and thoroughness). On the other hand, it seems that most people think that lawyers are significantly lower than the average person on agreeableness (willingness to kindly cooperate with others). The research on extraversion and neuroticism (proneness to depression and irritability), indicates that lawyers are lower in extraversion and higher in neuroticism than the average person.

With some idea of the type of person who becomes a lawyer, we turn our eyes to rural populations. A study compares Big Five traits among urban, suburban and rural populations. The study establishes that rural people tend to be higher than their urban counterparts in extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. They are also lower than urbanites in conscientiousness and openness. As described here, lawyers and rural populations are almost mirror images in terms of personality. The only trait which they share is their higher than average neuroticism, which probably does not make for a winning combination.

The cited study qualifies each of these disparities as nonsignificant when one controls for socio-demographic characteristics. This means that rural people do not display the above characteristics because they live in rural areas. Rather, they display them because they are much more likely to be poor, old and less formally educated (“POL”) than urban people, and the aforementioned set of personality traits is highly correlated with a person being POL.

One might suspect that this personality contrast applies to rural populations when compared with any high-income or highly specialized professions, but the evidence suggests otherwise. In Personality and Medical Specialty Choice: A Literature Review and Integration, family care physicians are characterized as high in agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and neuroticism, and only average or low in openness. At first glance, physicians appear to share far more personality traits with rural populations than lawyers, differing primarily in conscientiousness.

It has been proposed that the legal system might benefit from offering lawyers debt relief if they serve in a rural communities for a certain number of years, much like existing programs for physicians. While I cannot see how such a policy could be harmful, it could definitely face the personality profile of lawyers as compared with that of physicians and rural populations as a major hurdle.

This raises the question of what to do about it. Government-mandated personality changes are still unfeasible, and while money can do fearsome things to a person, it is not clear that it is adequate to overcome absolutely anything. It certainly could not keep my uncle in a lonely boat in Alaskan waters.

One idea is for law schools to admit classes with more varied personality profiles, including people more amenable to rural life. There is some evidence that law schools select for and exacerbate the personality traits characteristic of lawyers. However, rejecting applicants on the grounds of being “too diligent” or “too willing to engage with new ideas” would understandably raise other concerns.

CalMatters does deep dive into flat-fee contracts for indigent defense

Anat Rubin reports today for CalMatters, the non-profit news service, under the headline, "The Walmart of Public Defense:  How Justice Gets Sold to the Lowest Bidder in Rural California."  Here's an excerpt: 

For three years, the fate of poor people accused of crimes in San Benito County lay in the hands of attorneys who barely spoke with their clients and seldom filed legal motions on their behalf.

While defendants asked them to contest the prosecution’s evidence, to interview witnesses, to do anything, really, to challenge law enforcement’s narrative of the crime, they ushered almost all of them to plea deals instead, averaging just one jury trial for every 1,500 cases.

The attorneys worked for Fitzgerald, Alvarez and Ciummo, the firm that San Benito paid to provide public defense. According to a 2024 state evaluation, they were not doing a good job. Two of the attorneys had inappropriate relationships with clients, another struggled with addiction.

The situation had deteriorated so dramatically that the San Benito district attorney, Joel Buckingham, found himself worrying about the people his office was trying to send to prison. Their attorneys didn’t contest the evidence Buckingham’s prosecutors presented, no matter how it was obtained. Each year, they filed an average of just 10 motions to suppress evidence based on violations of constitutional rights — including unjustified stops and searches, illegal interrogations, and arrests without probable cause.

“Police officers must make mistakes sometimes,” Buckingham told a researcher conducting the evaluation.

The sheriff, Eric Taylor, was also alarmed. If his deputies were never challenged in court, how would they know when they had crossed a line? What would stop them from doing it again?

In Taylor’s previous job, in Santa Cruz County, the courthouse was often packed with law enforcement officers who had been called to defend their actions.

“If we’re doing our job correctly, then we prevail on those motions,” he told San Benito county supervisors last year. “And if we’ve made a mistake, and we’re doing our job incorrectly, we’re held accountable for that.”

Nearly half of California counties pay private lawyers and firms to represent poor people in criminal cases, and most of them, like San Benito, do it through what’s known as a “flat-fee” contract, meaning they pay a fixed amount, regardless of how many cases the attorneys handle or how much time they spend on each case.

It’s a far cheaper alternative — at least in the short run — to operating a public defender office with government lawyers, and it’s created a second-tier justice system in rural stretches of the state: Seven of the eight counties with the state’s highest jail and prison incarceration rates have flat-fee contracts.

You can read the rest of this deeply reported story here.  Read my own scholarship about rural indigent defense delivery here (Yale Law Journal Forum, about how these issues play out in Washington State) and here (Arizona Law Review, about Arizona).  

New book: Global Reflections on Positionality in Rural Access to Justice

Global Reflections on Positionality in Rural Access to Justice Research is published today by Bloomsbury.  The co-editors of this anthology are Michele Statz and Daniel Newman.  A synopsis follows: 

This book offers a unique look at rural access to justice through a series of personal and professional reflections by leading scholars in the field.

Engaging a “position sensibility”, it explores how our identities, class backgrounds, and professional privileges shape research and writing in rural places-and how those rural places in turn shape us.

This is an important collection, for while rural justice gaps are well-documented, considerably less has been written about the distinct opportunities that rural communities present for collaborative research, innovation, and policy development. The book offers us an honest, reflexive accounting of what has been done, why, and what's next to dismantle academic barriers and promote meaningful work on rural access to justice.

As a call to still deeper engagement with rurality, this book will inspire readers to consider rural place in their studies of law-and to consider their own place in scholarship on access to justice.

Here's the Table of Contents; as you will see, it includes many notable scholars of rural legal scholarship: 

1. Introduction, Rebecca Sandefur (Arizona State University, American Bar Foundation , USA) 

2. Claiming the South, Elizabeth Chambliss (University of South Carolina, USA)

3. From the Valleys to the Academy, Daniel Newman (Cardiff University UK)
4. Improving Access...Delivering Justice? Insights from Empirical Legal Research on (Rural) Access to Justice, Leslie S Ferraz (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime)
5. Indigenous Communities and Reparative Reflexivity in Socio-legal Studies, Brieanna Watters (University of Minnesota, USA)
6. Considerations of Access to Justice in the Context of Disaster, Kyle Mulrooney (University of New England, Australia), Marg Camilleri (Federation University Australia), Joseph F Donnermeyer (Ohio State University, USA) and Alistair Harkness (University of New England, Australia)
7. An Escape to Rurality, Maybell Romero (Tulane University, USA)
8. The Language of a Place, Michele Statz (University of Minnesota, USA)
9. The Slain South African Police Officer's Legacy Lives on: A Rural Criminologist's History, Witness Maluleke (University of Limpopo, South Africa)
10. Race, Rurality, and Marginalisation in the American South, Lauren Sudeall (Vanderbilt University, USA)
11. 'Do What Has to Be Done': How the Codes We Live By Shape Rural Access to Justice, Hillary Wandler (University of Montana, USA)
12. My Past is My Present: Teaching in and Writing about a Home Community, Hannah Haksgaard (University of South Dakota, USA)
13. Legal Pluralism and Human Rights Concerns, Wilfredo Ardito (Pontifical Catholic University
of Peru)
14. The Importance of Place in Law and Society, Mark Fathi Massoud (University of California, USA)

Legal Services Corporation releases long-awaited report at Rural Reach event

Panel of paraprofessionals who provide assistance to legal aid clients
"Rural Reach" event, Oct. 29, 2025, Madison, Wisconsin 

Here are the broad outlines of this important report, "Justice Where We Live:  Promising Practices from Rural Communities, quoting from the press release: 

For millions of Americans living in rural communities, access to civil legal help is out of reach, according to a report released today by the Legal Services Corporation (LSC). The report, “Justice Where We Live: Promising Practices from Rural Communities,” is a first-of-its-kind exploration of the barriers rural Americans face in accessing legal help – and the community-driven solutions already making a difference.

Across the country, 41% of counties are considered “legal deserts,” with few or no lawyers available to serve residents (source: Legal Evolution). In rural-heavy states like Wisconsin, which ranks among the bottom three nationwide for lawyers per capita, families and individuals often face life-altering legal problems — from housing insecurity to domestic violence — without meaningful access to assistance.

To address this urgent need, LSC convened its Rural Justice Task Force in 2021. Funded in part by Ascendium Education Group, today’s report release marks the Task Force’s work by highlighting four key challenges.

• The shortage of attorneys in rural areas.
• The digital divide limiting access to online resources.
• Geographic and transportation barriers.
• Cultural differences that can hinder trust in the legal system.

Alongside these challenges, the report highlights innovative solutions already underway in rural communities and offers recommendations for lawmakers, courts, legal aid providers, law schools, and others. Promising practices — from technology-enabled legal services to new recruitment pipelines for rural lawyers to expanding opportunities for professionals beyond lawyers to help those facing legal issues — show that progress is possible and replicable.

“If we want to know how to deal with the challenges that face rural Americans, the best thing we can do is talk to rural Americans and the people deeply rooted in those communities,” said Fr. Pius Pietrzyk, LSC Board Vice Chair and co-chair of the Task Force. “In this new report, we've taken a deep look at the reasons families cannot seem to get the civil justice they deserve, and our Constitution promises them, and offers concrete solutions not just for legal services offices, but for all Americans.”

“Access to justice should never depend on where someone lives, but for too many in rural Wisconsin and across the country, that’s the reality,” said Rebecca Rapp, General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer of Ascendium, who serves as co-chair of the LSC Task Force alongside Pietrzyk. “This report shines a critical light on the barriers rural residents face and points to solutions they have developed to close the justice gap in rural areas and beyond.”

The gallery walk at the "Rural Reach"
event featured innovative approaches
to serving rural residents where they
are.  Oct. 29, 2025

For rural residents, the stakes are high. LSC’s research shows that more than three-quarters of rural households face at least one civil legal problem each year, yet 86% receive inadequate help. Without legal assistance, families risk losing homes, veterans struggle to access earned benefits, and seniors face crushing debt with nowhere to turn.

The report emphasizes that while the challenges are steep, progress is possible.

“We know what works to close the rural justice gap,” said Ron Flagg, President of Legal Services Corporation. “We need to invest in programs that bring legal help to where people live — from growing the pipeline of rural attorneys, to supporting licensed legal paraprofessionals and community advocates, to using technology that connects clients to help across long distances.”

These ‘fixes’ only work, though, “with sustained commitment at the local, state, and federal levels,” Flagg added. “Together, we can ensure that geography never determines whether someone can access justice.”

 A big focus of the event--not highlighted here--was a push toward the use of para professionals--sometimes called "justice workers"--to help meet legal needs in rural places.   The final panel of the day featured four such paralegals or justice workers from Montana, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Georgia.  Interestingly, a program to empower paraprofessionals in Washington State--there called LLLT (limited license legal technicians)--was shuttered a few years ago.  Now such programs--at least among a few dozen states--are being seen as the future of filling the justice gap.  Two prior posts on the rural justice gap and how paraprofessionals might fill them are here and here.  

Panel of judges and the American Bar Association President 
speaking in support of licensing of paraprofessionals, sometimes
called justice workers. 

Maine Law Review Call for Papers. Rural Perspectives in Law: Challenges and Opportunities

The Maine Law Review is seeking article proposals for our topical issue: Rural Perspectives in Law: Challenges and Opportunities.  This issue will be published in spring 2026 as Volume 78.2 of our legal journal.

Abstracts of 300-500 words will be reviewed on a rolling basis and should be submitted no later than October 1, 2025, at 5:00 PM.  All submission should be sent to mlreditor@maine.edu.

Rural communities across the United States face unique legal challenges that often differ from those in urban and suburban settings.  Issues such as access to justice, scarcity of adequate legal counsel, limitations due to aging infrastructure, and the impact of shifting industries and demographics shape the practice of law in rural America.  Maine is the second most rural state in the country with 62% of its population living in rural areas. However, most of the legal providers are located in the more urban, southern portion of the state.  Rural communities outside of Maine face similar challenges.  

This volume is meant to speak about the challenges and potential opportunities rural communities across the nation face, and contribute to a broader conversation about how the law and policy can better serve rural America. 

Articles published in this upcoming volume of the Maine Law Review have the opportunity to contribute to an evolving area of law and to provide practical guidance and commentary on a pressing issue many rural communities across the nation are facing. Potential article topics could include but are not limited to: 

• Access to legal services in remote communities.
• The rise of virtual court hearings and tele-lawyering, and their impact on legal services.
• Infrastructure challenges in rural communities including broadband, utilities, etc., and legal solutions to them/the role of attorneys in rural economic development. 
• Unique issues to rural communities in areas of interest like family law, criminal law, property law, or impacts to rural economies or heritage industries.
• Property issues including zoning ordinances, land use regulation (farming, fishing, forestry, cannabis, etc.), or the impact of pollution/climate change on economic revitalization.
• The impact of federal funding priorities and the potential disproportionate impact on health or public services. 
• Recruitment, retention, burnout, and retirement of attorneys in rural communities.  

 The editors encourage creative and diverse viewpoints, and encourage interested authors to submit proposals on legal topics of interest that impact rural communities. 

Wisconsin Supreme Court details rural lawyer shortage in matter where criminal trial delayed 46 months

The Wisconsin Supreme Court decided State v. Ramirez last week, a matter about a criminal defendant who experienced a 46-month delay in being tried for an alleged crime. The court upheld his conviction, in part because he waited 32 months to assert his right to a speedy trial. This is one of the first cases in which I've seen a court acknowledge the legal relevance of the rural lawyer shortage.  Some excerpts follow:

¶1 Our federal and state constitutions guarantee criminal defendants the right to a speedy trial. The Sixth Amendment of the United States Constitution provides, "[i]n all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial," and Article I, Section 7 of the Wisconsin Constitution says, "[i]n all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right . . . in prosecutions by indictment, or information, to a speedy public trial." Luis A. Ramirez, as an inmate already serving a lengthy sentence for felony convictions, attacked and injured a corrections officer.  After a series of continuances and rescheduled trial dates, Ramirez was finally tried and convicted by a jury 46 months after he was criminally charged for the attack.

¶2 Ramirez moved for postconviction relief, alleging the 46-month delay violated his constitutional speedy trial right. The postconviction court denied his motion, and Ramirez appealed. The court of appeals reversed and ordered the only remedy available for constitutional speedy trial violations—dismissal of the charges. The State sought this court's review of a single issue: Whether Ramirez's constitutional right to a speedy trial was violated. We conclude it was not and reverse the court of appeals.

What follows is an excerpt from the concurrence by Chief Justice Ann Walsk Bradley, with whom Judge Janet Protasiewicz joined.  

¶80 In this case Ramirez's claim was doomed by his 32-month delay in asserting his speedy trial right and his failure to persuade that the 14-month duration from his assertion of the right to his trial violates the constitution. However, I cannot join the majority's approach because it could give the State a pass in cases involving delays even longer than the 46 months at issue here.

¶81 At a time where defendants are experiencing significant delays in appointment of counsel, this concern is especially acute.[5] Delays due to the lack of available attorneys can stretch into the triple digits. See Lee, 401 Wis. 2d 593, ¶6 (Dallet, J., dissenting) (setting forth that the defendant was held in custody "for 113 days before a preliminary examination, 101 of which were prior to the appointment of counsel").[6] In 2022, the state public defender opined that it would "take several years to clear a backlog of roughly 35,000 cases because of a shortage of public defenders."[7]

¶82 In Wisconsin's vast rural areas, especially in the northern part of the state, the problem has reached crisis levels. Although the data is admittedly at least seven years old, an article published in 2018 describes how "[o]ver 60% of the state's attorneys practice law in major urban areas, leaving some counties in rural Wisconsin with attorney-to-resident ratios as high as 1:4,452." Lisa R. Pruitt et al., Legal Deserts: A Multi-State Perspective on Rural Access to Justice, 13 HARV. L. & POL'Y REV. 15, 81 (2018) (footnotes omitted). In comparison, the statewide ratio is about 1:389.[8]

¶83 Additionally, the population that is practicing law in the rural north is rapidly aging. As of 2018, "[a]cross the northern half of the state, only six of the forty attorneys in Vilas County are under the age of fifty, and Florence and Pepin counties have no lawyers under fifty. Oconto County has two, and no new attorneys have moved into the county in the last decade." Id. at 81-82 (footnotes omitted). In total, as of that time, "[n]ine counties in northern Wisconsin ha[d] ten or fewer active attorneys." Id. at 82 (footnote omitted). Although this data is now seven years old,[9] the problem has certainly not abated. In fact, it has only worsened.[10]

¶84 As of 2024, the number of active attorneys in Wisconsin had dropped four percent over the last four years, while the number of attorneys in rural Wisconsin had plummeted by seven percent.[11] Eight counties have no certified private bar attorneys to take cases when the state public defender cannot represent a defendant.[12] Such a shortage "not only impacts the constitutional rights of defendants—it also affects victims and our communities."[13] Despite intervening attempts to address the root causes of the shortage, the problem persists.[14]

¶85 The shortage of lawyers in rural areas is a systemic problem, not an intentional one, putting it at risk of being termed "neutral" in the parlance of the majority's speedy trial analysis.[15] It is possible that a defendant could spend months or even years awaiting the appointment of an attorney, a necessity for any trial, much less a speedy one. And as the majority opinion demonstrates, when a delay is termed neutral, good luck to a defendant in succeeding on a speedy trial claim.

¶86 This court should not give its seal of approval to such an approach. Rather, the court of appeals approached this case the right way by breaking down the periods of delay and determining the reasons behind them and the weight to be given in the Barker analysis. The analysis conducted by the court of appeals represents a more nuanced approach that is better suited to the fact-specific nature of a speedy trial determination. See Urdahl, 286 Wis. 2d 476, ¶11.

CLE on recruiting and retaining rural lawyers sponsored by Virginia Bar Association

See the announcement here for the program on June 26 at 12:00 pm/noon Eastern.  I'm cutting and pasting core details below.   

Recruiting and Retaining Rural Lawyers: Challenges and Incentives

Join the VSB for its new virtual Lunch & Learn series—monthly CLEs and webinars featuring topics of interest to VSB members. Tune in from your office to learn more about the programs and initiates of the VSB and earn free CLE credits (when applicable).

Recruiting and Retaining Rural Lawyers: Challenges and Incentives

Thursday, June 26, 12–1 pm

Join us for a Lunch and Learn webinar sponsored by the Virginia State Bar’s Entry, Growth & Distribution of Virginia Attorneys Study Committee(EGAD VA), on June 26 at noon. Rural legal practice is vital to ensuring access to justice, yet many underserved communities continue to face a shortage of attorneys due to geographic, economic, and professional barriers. Professor Hannah Haksgaard will examine the landscape of rural legal practice and share research-based strategies for recruiting and retaining lawyers in these areas, including insights on effective incentive programs.

On rural legal deserts, this time in the Bench + Bar of Minnesota

Shaun Jamison of Purdue Global Law School writes (excerpting just a little here, but don't miss the full column): 

It won’t come as news to lawyers living and working in rural areas, but many of the people who live there are challenged by a lack of access to solutions to their legal needs. The access to justice issues have grown so acute in many places that a relatively new term of art—“legal deserts”—has grown up in legal aid circles to describe them. This article will offer a brief discussion of some of the key issues as well as possible solutions. 

* * *

There are several reasons for the low ratio of rural lawyers, including a misperception that a lawyer cannot make a living in a rural area, the “graying” of the rural bar, and a paucity of new lawyers coming in to serve rural areas. Some will argue that more lawyers are not the solution, or at least not the only solution, but there still is a minimum number of lawyers needed to ensure the protection of people’s constitutional rights and ensure the functioning of the court system. A criminal case, for example, requires three lawyers in a county to be available—and free of conflicts in the matter at hand—to try a case: a judge, a prosecutor, and a defense lawyer. 

Here's a (nearly) one-stop shop on legal deserts and related aceess to justice issues.  And Jamison refers to Hannah Haksgaard's new book, The Rural Lawyer (Cambridge University Press 2025), an important new resource. 

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. 

Hillbilly cosplay and the privilege coverup

With nearly 120,000 reviews and a 4.4-star rating among Amazon purchasers, Hillbilly Elegy seems to strike a fond chord with readers. The book, a memoir of J.D. Vance's life, tells the story of a young boy with Appalachian roots navigating a new world from Ohio to Yale Law School. Vance tells the story of how he, a self-labeled hillbilly, rose from the dregs of poverty to wealth through his hard work and grit. 

In 2020, Netflix released the film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy. Not having copious amounts of time as a third-year law student yet wanting to know about the new U.S. Vice President, the movie would be the perfect chance for me to verify the acclaim. Unfortunately, after watching, I am left feeling unmoved, uninspired, and frankly, disappointed in the narrative promoted by Vance. 

Shortly after beginning, Hillbilly Elegy tracks Vance while in law school. The scene occurs at a recruiting event for law students attempting to network with fancy, private firm attorneys, hoping to secure a summer internship at a big firm. Initially, I felt empathy for Vance as he attempted to fit in by ordering a glass of wine. However, Vance was immediately confounded when a server presented him with several wine varietals unfamiliar to Vance, eventually being rescued by a teacher who ordered him a Chardonnay. My empathy extended as Vance became immediately uncomfortable upon sitting for dinner because of the numerous forks at his place setting, not knowing the purpose of each.

Vance's story is similar to mine. Raised by a single mom and surviving thanks to government assistance, I was utterly unprepared for law school. It seemed like all my classmates had parents who were doctors, lawyers, or white-collar professionals. For them, it seemed like law school was second nature. However, law school was a new world for someone like me—raised by a minimum-wage-earning office secretary. Like Vance, I was ultimately and utterly "a fish out of water."

While most viewers might continue watching this networking scene in Hillbilly Elegy, feeling sorry for Vance, I had a different reaction. I felt pity for Vance, but not because of his awkward situation; instead, I felt pity for Vance because I knew how the story ended. I knew who Vance would become. 

For all intents and purposes, Vance defied the odds and became successful through hard work. His rise is objectively admirable. However, I believe Vance is a cosplayer at best and a traitor to his people at worst. Vance grew up in suburban Ohio, two generations removed from living in the Appalachian hills. Although he self-designates himself a hillbilly, that designation is suspect and laughable to some critics.

Even worse than Vance's cosplay as a hillbilly when it benefits him, Vance actively engages in harmful rhetoric against his so-called people. He describes the impoverished as lazy burdens on the system. If Vance were a hillbilly, perhaps he might understand that laziness has nothing to do with the poverty experienced by poor white folk in rural America.

In my opinion, Vance is not a hillbilly. He does not deserve that title. I believe Vance only calls himself a hillbilly for one reason—to preclude accusations of privilege, as if privilege diminishes his accomplishments. 

Vance is privileged. Returning to the movie's dinner scene, Vance, upon seeing the multiple forks, retires to the hallway to ask Usha (his then-girlfriend and now wife) how to approach the dilemma. Returning to a table of classmates and prominent attorneys, Vance tells the table a little about himself. Vance goes on to talk about military service and attending The Ohio State University for his undergraduate degree, leading to one of the attorneys asking Vance if he was a "redneck."

To me, this dinner scene is perfectly illustrative of the privilege Vance has as a white man. When Vance returns to the table, he is seen and treated by the others as one of them, starting on a level playing field. Nevertheless, while Vance's sex and skin color entitle him to a favorable baseline opinion from the others, those belonging to minority groups often start far below in the esteem of the group, only to be deemed an equal by them proving themselves worthy. As Vance's statements and reactions to the group's questions grow more abrasive and subjectively rude, it is by sheer grace, and ultimately privilege, that he is offered an interview from someone at the table.

Hillbilly Elegy tells more than a story about an individual achieving the American Dream. The memoir tells the story of privilege, that despite considerable adversity, sometimes being white does mean that "you'll be all right."

Location, Location, Location Revisited: More Needs to be Done

For this post, I am going to revisit a post I made seven years ago in which I discussed the role that law schools can play in alleviating the rural lawyer shortage. While academia has made some progress, namely in the establishment of rural legal clinics, it has not tackled the problem in a way that could lead to meaningful change. 

Many of the underlying statistics from seven years ago are still true. Data from the Occupational Employment Statistics within the Bureau of Labor Statistics still bears out that the rural lawyer shortage is practically universal around the country. As it was in 2017, Southwestern Montana is an exception. There is one additional exception, the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. As with last time, I am measuring the shortage by location quotient, which provides a good approximation of an area's employment in a given sector compared to the national average. The Location Quotient controls for population so you can do a direct comparison between rural and urban employment. 

While the media has spoken a lot about people migrating to rural communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, this migration has not been even. An analysis from The Daily Yonder suggests that rural communities whose economies depend on recreation saw the greatest increase from this migration. While rural America continues to grow after the pandemic, a further analysis from The Daily Yonder shows that between 2023-2024, population growth was concentrated in rural counties that border metropolitan areas. Neither of these developments are particularly helpful to the vast majority of rural counties. 

One huge difference that I have seen in the last decade that I have been writing about this issue is an increase in general awareness. Some states are actually offering incentives to practice in rural spaces and law schools are increasingly offering rural practice clinics or similar such opportunities. A report to the Maine Legislature in January 2024 quantified the impact of the University of Maine's Rural Practice Clinic in Fort Kent, in the remote northern part of the state. These opportunities are important and do help tremendously. However, the students are only there for a portion of their law school experience, often as little as a semester. The jury is still out as to whether or not these types of programs actually increase the number of lawyers who opt to live and work in rural spaces. 

I have long advocated for the establishment of law schools in rural communities so students can spend three years immersed in a rural space, learn what it means to be part of a rural community, and have more time to extern in the small practices and/or local governments that dot the rural landscape. 

The Current Landscape

In the past seven years, there has not been a single rural law school established. However, there also hasn't been a rural law school closure. So, we have kind of been stuck with the status quo over the past few years. By my count, there are 11 ABA Accredited law schools located outside of metropolitan areas, though some of these are in larger college towns: 

• Appalachian School of Law (Grundy, VA)
• Ohio Northern University (Ada, OH)
• Pennsylvania State University (University Park, PA)
• Penn State Dickinson Law (Carlisle, PA)
• University of Idaho (Moscow, ID)
• University of Mississippi (Oxford, MS) 
• University of New Hampshire (Concord, NH)
• University of South Dakota (Vermillion, SD)
• University of Wyoming (Laramie, WY)
• Vermont Law and Graduate School (South Royalton, VT)
• Washington and Lee University (Lexington, VA)

There are 198 fully accredited ABA law schools so roughly 5% are located outside of metropolitan areas. There are some law schools in areas that might be considered more remote - Cornell University in Ithaca, New York is a good example. Students at those schools would have more opportunities to be exposed to small town practice than a student in a major metropolitan area. However, these areas are still metropolitan areas and job centers in their own right. 

Exposure, Exposure, Exposure

I still believe many of my original points from 2017 - there is no better way to expose students to the issues facing rural communities than prolonged exposure. Becoming immersed in a community for multiple years is the best way to understand its problems. As I said then, even if a student does not remain in the rural community after law school, they still leave with a greater understanding of the challenges that the legal profession faces in those spaces. They can become advocates for actually addressing the problem. 

Law Schools Are Needed in Rural Spaces

If you've been online long enough, you have read the line that we have too many law schools. I'm not sure I agree, and my reasons are the same that they were seven years ago. We have too many law schools in metropolitan areas and too few law schools in small towns and rural communities. We need more law schools in small towns and rural communities. 

What should this look like? A scan of the schools listed above shows a potential solution. Only two of the schools, Vermont and Appalachian, are private standalone schools without a parent university. And both have experienced financial issues within the last decade. In response, Vermont Law decided to reinvent itself by offering master's degrees in areas such as public policy and becoming a "law and graduate school." As I did seven years ago, I believe that schools like Appalachian and Vermont play a key role in the solving the rural lawyer shortage. 

But there is stability in the backing of a major university system, and I believe that the path forward is for state university systems to leverage their resources and state backing to put law schools on their rural campuses. This would provide a financial shelter that a standalone school would not have, and it would provide stability for the students who opt to attend these schools.

I'll use my home state of North Carolina as an example of how this could look. North Carolina has one of the most expansive university systems in the country with every public university being considered a part of the University of North Carolina system. In total, there are 17 campuses with four located outside of metropolitan area: 

• Appalachian State University (in Boone)
• Elizabeth City State University 
• University of North Carolina at Pembroke
• Western Carolina University (in Cullowhee)

The idea of establishing a new graduate school on one (or more) of these campuses would not be without recent precedent. Just this year, UNC Pembroke established a Doctor of Optometry program in order to alleviate the rural medical provider shortage.

A law school on any of these campuses would address the access to justice issue in a historically impoverished portion of the state. Appalachian and Western Carolina serve Appalachia while Elizabeth City State and UNC Pembroke serve Eastern North Carolina. A law school on a small rural campus also allows for specialization in rural lawyering. Unlike a law school on a flagship state university campus, it won't necessarily attract students who are looking for urban opportunities. A smaller, most focused school should yield the best results for both the students and local community. 

The Raging Current 

But it would be naive to assume that establishing a new rural institution isn't swimming against an already roaring current. 

There is an epidemic of closures and mergers of small rural institutions over the last several years. In 2023, the Hechinger Report estimates that at least a dozen rural, non-profit institutions had closed or announced plans to close since 2020.  In Vermont (a majority rural state with one small metro area), there have been five non-profit college closures since 2019. Keeping a small rural school afloat is becoming a gargantuan task. 

But the closures and mergers aren't just limited to private schools. Public universities are also closing and merging. You can look at Vermont to see a spate of mergers that ultimately involved four public colleges becoming one. In 2018, publicly funded Lyndon State University merged with Johnson State University to form Northern Vermont University. In 2023, two more rural colleges, Castleton State University and Vermont Technical College merged with Northern Vermont University to form Vermont State University.

Even the schools that are staying open are cutting majors and ultimately opportunities. Dr. Pruitt posted about this issue a couple of weeks ago. Her post linked to a story that discussed the struggles of a student at Delta State University, a public university in rural Mississippi, who saw her planned major cut. The story discussed majors being cut at rural public universities in places as far flung as New York, Minnesota, North Carolina, Alaska, and Arkansas.

Rural education is in trouble and convincing lawmakers to invest further is going to be a challenge. I did provide an example above of a rural public university investing in graduate education so it's not impossible.

Conclusion

To successfully solve the rural lawyer shortage, it is essential that lawmakers realize the value of investing in a public rural law school. These schools not making money should not be seen as detriment but rather a key investment. 

A public rural law school would ensure that students are exposed to rural issues for all three years of their education, and a small public rural law school provides an opportunity to further specialize in small town practice and attract students who are interested in (or at least open to) the idea of small-town practice. 

Nevada Bar takes up matter of legal deserts

The Nevada Lawyer Magazine took up the issue of legal deserts in its June 2024 issue, including a story by Katherine Stocks titled, "The Far-Reaching Consequences of Nevada's Legal Deserts."  She offers a novel and sophisticated means of determining when a place is vulnerable to becoming a legal desert.  That calculation takes into account the age of existing lawyers (or, more precisely, how long they have been practicing) as well as how many are judges, prosecuting attorneys or public defenders, all roles that limit their ability to represent clients.  The study found that southern Clark County (where Las Vegas is located) and Elko County, in north central Nevada, are the places most at risk in terms of legal deserts. The study helpfully differentiates within counties.  So, for example, while parts of both Clark and Elko counties have plenty of lawyers, other regions of the counties, which cover large territories, do not.   

Another story in the June issue addresses what the University of Nevada Las Vegas Law School is doing to address the state's rural lawyer shortage.  Currently, for example, there is a rural summer externship program that is a collaboration of the UNLV Law School and Nevada's Department of Indigent Defense Services (DIDS).  

Australian state proposes student debt relief for lawyers willing to practice in rural places

"Bold new plan to get more lawyers to go to the bush," is the headline for this radio story by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation last week.  That "bold" plan involves helping lawyers pay their student loans if they're practicing in a rural, remote or regional area of Australia.  

Here's the promotional blurb: 

There's a dire shortage of lawyers in regional Australia and it's having devastating impacts on people’s everyday lives. One group is proposing a bold plan to try and entice lawyers to ditch the city and go bush. Brett McGrath is President of the Law Society of New South Wales and he tells ABC Newsradio’s Tom Oriti about how waiving student debt could make a big difference.

Here's a compelling excerpt from the interview, after the interviewee, Brett McGrath, notes the disparity between what solicitors can earn in the city and in the country: 

We have some solicitors in rural and regional New South Wales who are paying admin assistants more than they're paying themselves because they're trying to meet overheads week to week, and we are the most heavily regulated profession in the country.  We have ethical obligations.  We have reporting requirements.  And most [solicitors] are employing people.  They're employers so they have to go through workplace employment legislation.  They have all these obligations so they're really struggling to make  ends meet. ... 

I'm the President of the Law Society.  It took me seven years working full time in southwest Sydney and working as a lecturer at a university--so working a second job--it took me seven years to pay off A$40,000 in Hecs.  So you can imagine... A$70,000 is the average now... so with cost of living pressures and rental and all those sort of things... it's a big problem and that's why we think this is a solution that can address that need, particularly for rural and regional areas and make it really attractive for solicitors to come and set their practices up.  

Interviewer:  

If you're a lawyer who will go to the regions to help ease that shortage you'll get your HECS-help fees waived, and if you've already made contributions, they're refunded.  Is that right? 

McGrath:

So, it has its anchor point from the Commonwealth's own review into legal assistance which called for having solicitors who moved to rural, regional and remote areas as a baseline having 45% of their work legal aid work or they work for a Community Legal Centre ... We say that should be a baseline.  We think at the Law Society of New South Wales that should be taken to the next level because of what we're seeing on the ground in rural and regional areas of New South Wales but also across the country that it should be extended to anyone who wants to move to set their practice up and start their careers in regional areas should have their hex waived.  

There are similar schemes to attract teachers, to attract doctors and nurses to regional areas.... We see law and access to justice as a critical part of our infrastructure and services we provide.  

Lismore (New South Wales) is a great example where in disaster zones people are in trouble ... they reach out.  Who do they turn to?  They turn to their solicitor when they're in need. 

Interviewer: 

Have you put that [expensive proposal for debt relief] to the government?  Have you had any response? 

McGrath:  

We've suggested that it'll cost about A$6 million in the first year, and that's ... for the base program.  The first port of call is to have those with 45% of their work in legal aid and in Community Legal Centres so that's about A$6 million and we've put that to the federal government and the Law Council of Australia has ... put that forward as a proposal to the commonwealth.  

Interviewer:  

Any Response?  

McGrath:  

We're waiting on a response.  

Solving a rural county's public defender shortage one (or two) lawyer(s) at a time

The Methow Valley News reported earlier this month on an expansion of the public defender staff in Okanogan County, Washington (population 42,000).  (A prior post about the situation in this county that straddles the Cascades, on the Canadian border, is here).  The story is by Marcy Stamper, and the lede follows: 

The situation for people in Okanogan County who can’t afford a lawyer — and for the attorneys who represent them in court — has improved, with two lawyers joining the county’s public defense team and more money for indigent defense available through the end of the year.

One attorney started at the end of April and the other starts next week, Anna Burica of Burica Law, who holds the contract for public defense work for Okanogan County, said last week. One lawyer will work full-time on cases in Okanogan County Superior Court, and the other will work a 75% schedule in District Court. Neither attorney is based in Okanogan County, so both will handle many cases remotely, traveling to the county as needed for trials, certain hearings, and to meet with clients, Burica said.

The additional attorneys and money from the county “will keep us afloat a little longer,” Burica said. Because the state places limits on the number of cases each attorney can handle, Burica and another attorney expect to reach their limit by August, she said.

The story then describes new standards regarding case load limits for public defenders.  These standards that will be implemented over the next four years: 

The new numbers mean that Okanogan County will need 10 full-time attorneys for Superior Court cases, another 10 in District Court, and two in juvenile court. That’s a huge increase, since current contracts (a mix of full- and part-time) add up to just over three attorneys, Burica said. Burica handles some cases as well as administrative duties.

It’s going to be very difficult to find 22 attorneys to do full-time criminal work, Burica said. The pool for new attorneys is not encouraging — right now, there aren’t even 10 attorneys in Okanogan County, including those in private practice, who practice criminal law on the defense side, she said.

Okanogan County will also need 17 legal assistants to help with investigations and mitigation, Burica said. Mitigation specialists look at a defendant’s entire history — such as family issues or abuse — and can help build a case that avoids the maximum penalty, she said.

Stamper also includes some data I've not seen before regarding law school enrollment nationally: 

The situation is complicated by a drop in law-school enrollment nationwide. There was an average of 43,000 first-year students from 1988 through 2000, but then enrollment grew, peaking at 52,400 in 2010. After that, there was a steep drop for four years, ultimately stabilizing at about 38,000 new law students annually.

These data ignore the fact that most law students desire to work in metropolitan areas rather than rural ones, a bigger issue than the sheer number of those earning J.D. degrees.  Read more on these issues here.

Stamper quotes Okanogan County Commissioner Andy Hover as saying that that the state's failure to fund indigent defense makes it an "unfunded mandate, which counties struggle to afford.  He says the cost of providing indigent defense, which will rise with the new standards, could be "in the millions."  Here's some additional context from Stamper: 

The state Legislature has also appropriated a small amount of money for public defense. That includes $900,000 (split between cities and counties) to improve the quality of public defense services.

Hover called that additional state money “a drop in the hat.”  Stamper continues: 

Another $1.86 million will go toward internships and training, in part with the aim of encouraging attorneys to practice in rural areas. Some appropriations are specifically for representation connected with drug crimes, parents programs, and cases involving the insanity defense.

Read more about what is happening at the state level from Daniel Beekman in the Seattle Times, here and here.  

Rural Legal Scholarship: Michele Statz on "The Scandal of Particularity"

 Here's the link to Statz's latest article, and the abstract follows.  The title is "The Scandal of Particularlity: A New Approach to Rural Attorney Shortages and Access to Justice," and it is forthcoming in the South Dakota Law Review:   

This article adds necessary dimension to prevailing understandings of the rural attorney shortage and proposed solutions to it. These solutions include efforts to recruit and retain rural attorneys; to advance “non-lawyer” practitioners; and to create distance-spanning rural access to justice technologies. While many of these initiatives are based in careful, empirical analysis and have strong evaluative components, they often start with an answer: More attorneys. UPL Waivers. Legal help apps. Legal empowerment. This makes sense, particularly when we consider that many of the individuals at the forefront of addressing the rural access to justice crisis are themselves law scholars or legal professionals who feel real, understandable urgency toward finding a solution. What happens, however, when we approach rural attorney shortages not with a proposed initiative, but with more, and different, questions? Instead of a solution-centric or even person-centered approach, what if we sought to understand the subjective, relational experience of legal problems in rural places? How might honoring the lived reality of rural community members who are and who are not legal professionals unsettle what we believe about professional hierarchies, expertise, and who is best suited to address attorney shortages?

Drawing on over seven years of mixed-methodological, collaborative research in diverse rural settings, this article proposes a new epistemological approach to rural access to justice and professional shortages. It provides empirically based principles for students, scholars, and practitioners to consider as they explore rural justice gaps and efforts to address them. It demonstrates that a deep, considered acknowledgement of crisis, trust, home, care, time, and relationships—in short, the embodied particularities of rural place and how they feel—offers a kind of knowledge that necessarily exceeds familiar metrics and indicators of “success.” Finally, this framework ensures that practices and policies aimed at solving rural attorney shortages are relevant, collaborative, and sustaining.

Public defender crisis in Washington State afflicts both rural and urban counties

Daniel Beekman reported for the Seattle Times late last month on the indigent defense (aka "public defense") crisis facing Washington State, both its rural and urban sectors.  A few days later, Marcy Stamper reported for the Methow Valley News, out of nonmetro Okanogan County in north central Washington, under the headline "Public defenders struggle under big caseloads."  

Here's an excerpt from the Seattle Times story, which provides the big picture:  

Staffing shortages and burnout-inducing caseloads are squeezing urban areas like King County, rural areas like Asotin County and communities in between. Facing each other across the Columbia River, Benton and Franklin counties are struggling as they compete for attorneys from the same shallow pool.

There are consequences. In some instances, people presumed innocent are languishing in jail without counsel. In others, prosecutions have been delayed or dismissed because defendants lack representation, potentially putting crime victims and others at risk. In still others, defendants are getting shortchanged because their attorneys are too busy. It’s difficult to get a grip on the scale of such problems, because statewide data is lacking.

Meanwhile, cash-strapped counties are watching their expenses soar with minimal support from the Legislature. Some counties are actually suing the state over that reality, and experts say it’s only a matter of time before an unrepresented defendant also sues, alleging their rights have been violated.

As a further illustration of the problem and how it links to jail populations, Beekman writes that the director of the Washington Office of Public Defense (OPD) last year asked the Washington Supreme Court for a moratorium on attorney assignments for defendants who are not in custody so that backlogs of jailed clients could be cleared.  The court denied the request.   It did, however, ask OPD to survey the counties, which revealed that the highest shortages of public defenders are in rural counties.  According to Stamper's story in the Methow Valley News, 

Okanogan County had the third-highest vacancy rate in the state, with 50% of spots unfilled at the time, surpassed only by Asotin County (67%) and Lewis County (56%). (Seven of the 39 counties didn’t respond to the survey.)

The Washington Supreme Court is considering lowering caseload caps, to more aggressively limit how many cases each attorney can handle.  Doing so too quickly, however, will aggravate the situation because too few attorneys are available to absorb the cases that the existing attorney work force would need to shed.  Indeed, Beekman's story also considers the struggle to recruit attorneys to do this work, including in rural areas.  

Washington lawmakers are working on a bill that would establish a state-managed internship program to train law students and graduates as defenders and prosecutors in rural areas. But internships won’t reverse the shortages overnight, and a proposal to repay student loans for new recruits has been cut during the bill’s journey through the current legislative session. A separate bill that would greatly bolster state funding for public defense is likely dead, with no action taken since the session began in January.

* * * 

Fewer people are going to law school; young attorneys are choosing less-intense jobs with better pay; the COVID pandemic created backlogs; policing changes like body-worn cameras are making cases more time-consuming to handle.

Beekman explains some of the consequences for defendants of not having a lawyer advise them:  

Defendants have no one to talk with about their options. To argue for their release so they can keep a job or custody of a child. To interview witnesses. To secure evidence, like surveillance video before a recording gets taped over.

In neighboring Oregon, a federal district court in November ordered the "release anyone haled in jail without an attorney for more than seven days after being arraigned."

Beekman writes about rural areas in particular, and in doing so he references phenomena I and others have written about in other states--including paying attorneys to drive from other counties to provide indigent defense in a county with too few attorneys or where the attorneys in that county have conflicts.  ("Windscreen time" and the need for local governments to pay for it was an issue discussed a decade ago at the University of South Dakota symposium kicking off Project Rural Practice, which became the Rural Attorney Recruitment Program).  

In some of Washington’s smallest counties, officials scramble to hire out-of-town contractors and pay them by the hour to represent defendants because there are so few local attorneys and even fewer who want the work.

Ten counties in the state have no more than 30 residents practicing law of any sort, Dan Clark, a senior deputy prosecutor in Yakima County, wrote in a column for the state Bar Association last year, noting that attorney shortages are resulting in vacancies on the prosecutorial as well as the defense side.

“Most law school graduates tend to be in their 20s or 30s, and to be blunt, most rural areas simply do not offer the variety of restaurants, entertainment, and social opportunities that urban areas can provide,” Clark wrote. “Many law school graduates have significant student loan debt, and lower salaries in rural areas — particularly for governmental attorneys — can be a barrier to attracting and retaining new and young lawyers to rural communities.”

Several defense attorneys under contract with Okanogan County in North Central Washington live elsewhere, including over the mountains in Western Washington, said Anna Burica, who leads the work and manages the roster. Judges allow them to appear in court via video, reluctantly.

“You want that face-to-face contact before making a big decision, and a lot of people just don’t get that opportunity,” Okanogan Judge Robert Grim said.

Here's what Stemper reports out of Okanogan County, leading with information about the caseloads there: 

For now, the workload is manageable and — crucially — within the limits set by the Washington State Bar Association. But if it continues at the current pace, some of the county’s public defenders won’t be able to take more cases, said Anna Burica of Burica Law, who holds the contract for public defense work for Okanogan County.

Burica handles cases on her own and subcontracts with seven other attorneys to provide legal representation to indigent defendants in Okanogan County.

Although the year started with an especially heavy load, the situation in Okanogan County is better than in some of Washington’s counties — no one is sitting in jail without an attorney, Burica said. But attorneys are overworked and struggle to find time to meet with clients, collect evidence, and prepare for defense.

“We’re overloaded, but all within the state standards. I hope it will slow down,” Burica told the Methow Valley News in February.

* * * 

While the state requires the county to provide indigent defense services, it pays just 5% of the county’s costs — even less if you consider that the county isn’t paying attorneys what they’re worth, Okanogan County Commissioner Andy Hover told the News. “It’s an unfunded mandate,” he said.

Moreover, Okanogan County has a higher proportion of indigent defendants than wealthier counties, creating a disproportionate burden, Hover said.

Washington is one of just 12 states in the country that provide only minimal funding for indigent defense. Here's more on the cost implications--including local taxes--of these attorney deficits, per Beekman in the Seattle Times: 

In January, tiny Asotin County in Eastern Washington had only one attorney under contract to represent defendants charged with felonies, and he lived 100 miles away in Spokane, County Commissioner Brian Shinn said. Shelling out $150 per hour to other attorneys boosted the county’s defense costs (by about 43% last year), putting strain on an already-tight budget, he said.

Although Asotin County is raising its sales tax rate this year, most stores in the area are located across the Idaho border, so the revenue bump will be modest, Shinn said, explaining why he’s glad the Association of Counties sued the state in September, claiming the Legislature should step in.

"The state sends us $30,000,” while the county spent about $825,000 last year, the county commissioner said. “The state is really dropping the ball.”

Stamper provides more details on the funding situation in Okanogan County, as they relate to the overall state budget to support these services. 

Public-defense expenses in Washington exceed $200 million annually, but the state provides just $5.9 million of that, which is distributed to counties based on a complex formula set out in state law. An additional $1 million supplements the allocation to cities, Hulsey [managing attorney for OPD] said.

Of the $5.9 million, 6% is divvied equally among all counties. The remaining funding is allocated proportionately, half based on county population and half on the number of filings in each county’s Superior Court.

Although Okanogan County’s 2024 budget provides about $1.3 million for public defense, less than $50,000 of that comes from the state — in 2024, the county got $48,532, which will cover just 3.7% of the county’s costs, Hover [Okanogan County Commissioner] said.

Again the strain on county budgets echoes what I found in my deep dive in 2010 into how indigent defense is funded in Arizona. There, too, the state makes meager contributions to a constitutionally mandated function that is thus largely the fiscal responsibility of county governments. 

On the theme of spatial inequality, here are two more revealing data points from Stamper's story:

The state funding formula is not only inadequate, but it results in inequities. For example, in 2021, Grant County got less than 3% of its total spending from the state, while Garfield County got about 20%, according to a lawsuit filed against Washington by WSAC [Washington State Association of Counties].

Per capita spending on indigent defense services varies widely across counties. In 2018, Whitman County spent $6.71 per capita on public defense, whereas Skagit County spent $48.15, WSAC said.

Both of these deeply reported stories are well worth a read in their entirety.   Another terrific story about Washington State's court system--including the struggle of litigants to access its courthouses--is here.  

Oregon State Bar surveys the state's rural attorneys with a view to alleviating rural legal deserts

The Oregon Bar Bulletin recently reported under the headline, "Attracting Rural Lawyers."  The subhead is "Recruitment and Retention of Rural Attorneys Remains Critical to OSB's Mission."  Here's an excerpt from Cliff Collins' story: 

The ONLD [Oregon New Lawyers Division] held a discussion at its 2023 retreat on the issue [of how the Oregon State Bar can better support rural practitioneres]. Attendees included new Oregon Chief Justice Meagan Flynn, division and bar leadership, and some key OSB staff members.

One result was that the ONLD launched a Rural Project Work Group. As the first order of business, the group sponsored a survey last spring of all rural practitioners to learn more about issues facing them in the recruitment and retention of lawyers.

The division sent the survey to all attorneys practicing in counties the Oregon Bureau of Labor & Industries considers “nonurban” for minimum-wage purposes. This included 18 counties totaling 507 active, inactive and retired OSB members. One hundred forty-seven people responded, a 29% response rate, which is considered a healthy percentage, according to Catherine Petrecca, the OSB’s member services manager. Participants were given ample opportunities to provide open-ended comments, in addition to selecting responses from a list of provided options.

What the Survey Found

A majority of respondents expressed positive views about practicing in a rural environment. Although the survey’s executive summary did not identify names or locations of individuals who answered the survey, the Bulletin spoke with several bar members who practice in various parts of the state.

One rural practice trade-off--as one of the anonymous "responses to the survey noted--was that 'fewer people can pay for the full cost of your services, but lots of people need those services.'"

The story includes some other survey results: 

Survey respondents often mentioned lack of traffic, and ease of parking and getting to work as benefits of rural practice. 

* * * 

The bar survey found that some respondents remain pessimistic about recruitment potential and, even more so, about retention of new lawyers. One said: “Part of the problem with hiring is retaining attorneys. They work here for a year or two to get experience while they wait to move back to the larger areas.”

* * * 

Another outcome of the efforts by the ONLD was a list of recommendations made to the bar’s Board of Governors last September addressing rural practice. One of those recommendations was that the OSB extend its Loan Repayment Assistance Program — or LRAP — to include offering the opportunity to apply for repayment assistance to lawyers practicing in rural settings who meet other LRAP qualifications. The Board of Governors approved the recommendation, and the LRAP extension will take effect during this year’s application process. 

All of the bar members who spoke with the Bulletin supported the concept of the OSB’s expansion of the LRAP program to assist rural practitioners.

You can learn more about the Oregon State Bar's LRAP program as https://osbar.org/lrap.  

Another survey of attorneys--this one of all the state's attorneys, not only the rural ones, is reported here.