More Than Half of Rural Counties in U.S. Are Short on Lawyers, Study Finds

Growing up on her family’s farm near Ackley, Emma Bartling spent her childhood shadowing her father. Wherever he went, she went.

“I think some of my best and fondest memories are from working alongside my dad. We did everything together,” said Bartling, who graduated from Iowa State University this spring with a bachelor’s degree in agricultural and rural policy studies.

Years of helping her dad gave Bartling a firm grasp on how things work on the farm, where they grow row crops and raise livestock – including farrow-to-finish hogs and beef calves. But when her grandfather consulted with some Des Moines-based lawyers to plan to the generational transfer of the family operation, they didn’t have nearly as much familiarity with farming.

“They had no idea why we wanted to keep it in the family. They just really had no idea,” she said. “And it’s not just land. There’s millions of dollars of equipment and connections that you need to continue operating.”

The disconnect highlights a common and commonly overlooked problem in rural areas: a shortage of lawyers. A new study of legal deserts by Iowa State rural sociologist David Peters and two undergraduate researchers, including Bartling, found more than half of the 2,307 rural counties in the contiguous U.S. have an insufficient number of practicing private attorneys.

“People living in larger communities take it for granted, but not having enough lawyers around effectively diminishes access to justice,” said Peters, a professor of sociology and program director for the agricultural and rural policy major. “If you’re going through a custody or divorce dispute or need to get a restraining order, you need an attorney. Property and estate disputes, or if you’re accused of a crime, all of these situations and many others require legal representation.”

Identifying deserts

The study, published in the spring edition of the South Dakota Law Review, is among the first efforts to identify U.S. legal deserts, though it’s enough of a growing concern that several states have launched initiatives to incentivize practicing law in rural communities. 

“If you want to address the issue of rural legal deserts, you first have to know where they are located and how severe the problem is,” Peters said.

Using U.S. Census data from 2022, the study compared employment counts at private-sector law offices in nonmetropolitan counties to average employment levels in counties with similar levels of urbanization. Counties with fewer law-office employees than the average were categorized on a continuum that included critical, urgent and emerging legal deserts.

Legal-desert counties were more prevalent in the West and Southwest, especially the 11% of rural counties categorized as critical. About 29% of rural counties were urgent legal deserts, and 23% were emerging deserts. Eighteen of Iowa’s 99 counties were classified as a legal desert. Iowa’s legal deserts are generally clustered in southern counties, including Lee County in the southeast corner of the state – Iowa’s only critical-desert county.

The only other comparable study of legal deserts Peters and his students are aware of is a 2020 study by the American Bar Association, which measured the number of licensed attorneys by county. By using census data for law offices, the Iowa State study included support staff and excluded licensed lawyers who are in nonlegal fields, retired, or working for companies or institutions instead of a law firm.

Counting only legal professionals available to be hired – and using a data-based definition of sufficient employment levels – produced more legal deserts than the researchers anticipated, Peters said.

“I was kind of shocked by how large the numbers were,” he said.

A shrinking pipeline

Though there hasn’t been much comprehensive study of legal deserts, the issue has drawn an increasing amount of attention over the last decade, the researchers said. The concern is accelerating as baby boomers age out of the field.  

“I think people are realizing there’s this whole generation of legal professionals who will be retiring soon, and there’s no pipeline for replacing them,” Peters said.

Shrinking population in rural areas makes it difficult to expand that pipeline, as attorneys in those communities often grew up in a rural setting and chose to practice in a small town despite the numerous other options a law degree offers, Peters said.

“I think there are some inherent barriers,” he said. “The amount of schooling it takes to become a lawyer means it’s much more likely you’re going to end up in a city. The longer you’re in a city, the more likely you are to stay.”

The lack of existing practices in legal deserts also stacks the deck against young lawyers, providing fewer opportunities to take over an established firm. Legal-desert counties typically have from two to six law offices, almost all of them with four or fewer employees. More than half of the counties categorized as a critical legal desert have no law offices.

The study analyzed rural lawyer recruitment policies enacted by several states, including financial incentives offered in South Dakota, Arkansas, New Mexico, Louisiana, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio and Vermont. Income-based enticements are unlikely to be effective long-term because census data shows law-office employees in legal-desert counties already make salaries similar to those in other rural counties, Peters said.

Local solutions

Based on their analysis of state-level policies designed to address legal deserts, the researchers see the most promise in licensed legal paraprofessionals (LLP). At least eight states – Iowa not among them – have had programs allowing LLPs, who have less training than bar-certified lawyers with a law degree and are usually limited to practicing certain types of law with oversight from licensed attorneys. 

“It would allow lawyers to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively, like physician assistants do for doctors,” said Emily Meyer, a senior in agricultural and rural policy studies and a co-author of the study.  

Supporting community training programs that improve awareness of legal matters could also help, as rural residents without much exposure or access to attorneys would have a better sense of when to seek legal services, Bartling said.

“We want rural residents to have the ability to empower themselves and people around them to advocate for their issues,” she said. “We want them to be able to make those choices themselves.”

Peters said he hopes to conduct a follow-up study that compares legal deserts to rural counties that have high levels of access to legal services, in hopes of identifying what’s working well in communities with sufficient lawyers.

“We do think there’s some community agency here. There are things they can do,” he said.

On a smaller scale, Bartling and Meyer both plan to do their part. After finishing her bachelor’s degree at Iowa State next year, Meyer plans to attend law school and then practice law near her hometown of Anamosa. She’s passionate about agricultural law, but her work on the legal desert study drove home how versatile rural lawyers must be.

“You have to be the jack of all trades to practice in a rural community. There aren’t enough people there to specialize,” she said.

Bartling also plans to practice law in her hometown, inspired by her experience seeing family and neighbors struggle to find legal help in planning farm transitions. This fall, she’ll begin studying law at the University of South Dakota, with a focus on rural and agricultural law.

“I want to help family farms because they’re the backbones of rural communities,” she said. Newswise/SP