When Patrick Goetzinger was president of the State Bar Association in 2011, he noticed the Main Street attorney in rural South Dakota was becoming an endangered species.
“A goal of my term as State Bar president was to address the need for access to justice in rural communities and address the emptying out of law offices, and having no replacements for the country lawyer, the Main Street lawyer,” he said.
As a solution to this problem, Goetzinger founded the Rural Attorney Recruitment Program. The project is part of an initiative to stabilize the population of rural lawyers.
The program pairs qualifying attorneys at any point in their career with underserved counties for a five-year contract. The attorneys provide legal aid to rural areas. In return, they receive compensation that roughly matches the cost of their law school tuition; however, they are not required to use the compensation to pay off their loans.
To qualify, counties must have a population of 10,000 or less and be able to pay 35% of the lawyer’s compensation. Qualifying lawyers must reside in the county they serve, have a South Dakota law license, and hold good legal standing.
Bob Morris is chair of the Project Rural Practice Taskforce, which Goetzinger describes as the cheerleader for the recruitment program. Morris said South Dakota Supreme Court Chief Justice David Gilbertson was one of the first people to start advocating for the rural lawyer.
“What he was seeing was a creation of legal deserts in South Dakota,” Morris said, remembering Justice Gilbertson’s observations. “There were either no lawyers in certain counties, one lawyer in certain counties, or just two lawyers in certain counties. And what he had also identified was that 65% of the lawyers in South Dakota were essentially in five communities: Rapid City, Sioux Falls, Pierre, Brookings, and Aberdeen.”
Since so many lawyers gravitate to larger cities, many retiring rural lawyers struggle to find successors for their practice.
Looking back on his early days practicing law, Goetzinger remembered watching that happen in his rural hometown of Martin, South Dakota. In the end, there was just one lawyer left in town, approaching retirement with no successor in sight.
The goal of the program is for the recruited lawyers to continue working in their assigned community and then take over for retiring attorneys. Goetzinger said these retiring attorneys deserve to see their practice taken over by good hands.
Practicing law in small towns doesn’t appeal to everyone. Morris said many aspiring lawyers wonder how to find professional success in an isolated area.
“Well, if I’m a rural lawyer, will people think that I’m not a very good lawyer, that I ended up here because I wasn’t good enough for an urban law firm?” Morris said, speaking to common concerns regarding rural law. “Will I be able to make a living? Will there be issues regarding isolation?”
However, Morris points to Stephanie Pochop, a rural lawyer in Gregory, South Dakota. She won the 2023 Trial Lawyer of the Year award and was the third lawyer in her rural firm to do so. Morris said it’s proof attorneys can thrive in the country.
Amy Janssen, a graduate of the Rural Attorney Recruitment Program, still works in her assigned rural area of Kennebec, South Dakota. She said just because small towns lack lawyers doesn’t mean they lack opportunities.
“They just need you. They need city attorneys, they need state’s attorneys, they need defense attorneys,” she said. “They need all of that and there’s just nobody local, or there’s attorneys that drive hours away. So, if you want to, if you want to put the time in and put the work in, you can make it here.”
Janssen pointed out the many benefits of practicing law in a small community. She said all of her clients are very loyal to her, and the whole community is very supportive.
So far, the recruitment program has placed 31 attorneys into rural areas. Fifteen have graduated from their contract, and 12 of those graduates have stayed on to practice rural law.
The State Bar of South Dakota now offers another program for rural interns to further strengthen legal services. It supports rural firms that hire law students as interns.
The goal is to match interns with rural law firms and hope they go on to participate in the recruitment program after graduation from law school.
Goetzinger said this concept now has a national component.
“The LSC [Legal Service Corporation] was so interested in this concept and this topic that they formed a National Rural Justice Taskforce to take a look at access to justice issues in rural America and to appoint a nation-wide task force to talk about the causes, the symptoms, and the solutions to address rural justice issues, access to justice issues in rural America,” he said.
Many lawyers point out that access to legal services is not a privilege, it’s a right. And that means it’s critical to ensure that rural Main Street legal practices do not go extinct.