While there is a growing body of research on rural lawyering and rural access to justice,1 none approaches the subject with the level of detail and care to individual experiences that Professor Hannah Haksgaard does in her quietly landmark work, The Rural Lawyer: How to Incentivize Rural Law Practice and Help Small Communities Thrive. She sets out the book’s seemingly modest goal with a humility that mirrors the project she describes so lovingly, as an “analysis of how a program can help new rural lawyers.” (P. 8.) However, this deeply intimate account detailing the successes (and failures) of South Dakota’s Rural Attorney Recruitment Program, does far more than that: this book interrogates the relationship between communities, legal practice, lawyer to lawyer mentorship, and law itself. In doing so, it provides vital insights for our turbulent times.
The chapters of the book proceed intuitively and usually begin with an individual lawyer’s story; to Professor Haksgaard, this is always a study of and for people, both lawyers and clients. Even the opening chapter’s broad discussion of historic rural lawyering practices includes a specific illustrative biography: a stubborn lawyer riding circuit decides to “brave the weather” to get home, only to freeze his legs to his stirrups, ultimately causing his untimely death (we learn this is the author’s great grandfather). (Pp. 13, 18.) Providing the reader with the individual narrative first, and then diving into the broader observations and conclusions continuously grounds the reader in the human aspect of practice both for the lawyer and the client. In this way, Professor Haksgaard sidesteps a common flaw in works analyzing the legal profession: writing about it in such a technocratic role-differentiated way that neglects the fact that lawyers are still whole people.
In The Rural Lawyer, Professor Haksgaard makes a compelling case that South Dakota’s Rural Attorney Recruitment Program is one of, if not the most, successful attorney recruitment models being used to address the dearth of lawyers in rural practice. In broad brush strokes, this program provides accepted lawyers who commit to 5 years of rural practice, an annual stipend (roughly keyed to the cost of one year of in-state law school tuition) to support new private practices in rural areas. The stipend is paid through a cost share between the bar (15%), the judicial branch (from state courts’ annual budget) (50%), and the sponsoring local county or municipality (35%). (P. 32.) Professor Haksgaard identifies two key components of this program that have proved to be effective in supporting sustainable ongoing legal practice: attorneys in this program have the flexibility to take on both private and public clients and the local sponsorship element requires early relationship building between the lawyer and community and some grassroots buy in. In some instances, this aspect of the process required public presentations before municipal bodies making the case for why this was a good use of public funds and how the attorney in the program would provide services that were useful to the community. Ten years in, the program is clearly having an impact on participating the rural communities; attorneys in the program overwhelmingly not only served their required five years of rural practice, but 75% of them continued practicing law in their rural communities after their term ended. (P. 9, noting that 24 of 32 lawyers continue to practice in their rural communities.)
Access to lawyers is not the same as access to justice, and Professor Haksgaard is careful not to conflate the two. This is not a starry-eyed account of how the placement of rural lawyers in rural communities is a panacea for all the challenges and ills facing these communities. Many of these lawyers provide low cost and at times pro bono work, but not exclusively so. More commonly, they are cobbling together income from various sources and working with clients through fluid billing structures. Nor does she cherry coat the struggles of the attorneys themselves, who face huge financial challenges, social ostracism where they break with community norms, and the skepticism of local municipalities and counties as they make their various pitches for why this rural county in south Dakota needs a lawyer, let alone them, let alone more than one lawyer (one county ultimately decided to allow multiple lawyers into the program).
Haksgaard is deeply pragmatic, as she wants to not only get lawyers into rural communities, but have them stay. Many of her chapters focus on the logistics and financing of setting up or participating in a rural practice. Here, the hybrid of a baseline of stable government work combined with private work afforded rural attorneys flexibility. (P. 130.) Access to a free or low-cost workspace often made a significant difference in finances as well. Haksgaard also makes a compelling case that “smart rural residents” who have career options can go to law school and return to their communities where they “create their own jobs and act, in many ways, as entrepreneurs.” (P. 137.) Ultimately, lawyers in this space have a “solid career with long-term, stable, incomes” but trade the higher incomes of urban practices for the virtues of a rural life. Some enjoyed this stability, which allowed them to also run a small farm or ranch. (P. 141.)
Beyond the immediate economic challenges of financing law practice, mentorship of lawyers new to rural practice comes to the fore as pivotal to success. (P. 18.) According to Haksgarrd, these mentorship relationships bridge the gap between her observations that law schools generally appear more geared towards training lawyers for complex appellate practice skills than direct client services to members of the public. Mentorship takes a multiplicity of forms: from district attorneys’ offices providing support, to one to one transfers of small practices, to an entire law firm in a nearby city mentoring a solo practitioner (the solo practitioner’s parent was a partner there). It is clear throughout that mentorship given by senior attorneys did not financially benefit them. Rather, it was an act of service that often-caused hardship for mentor lawyers but was done out of a sense of duty and care not only for the ongoing legal needs of the community but for the junior lawyers themselves.
The case this book makes is that the work of rural lawyers, hard though as it is, is important. Professor Haksgaard’s account shows rural lawyers serving as mentors, prosecutors, transactional counsel aiding in property conveyances, advocates in civil suits, vital community and municipal touchpoints, and even effective grant writers. The legal profession as a whole, and law schools, sometimes imply that direct client-services to poor or middle-income communities is a low-prestige career path, best fit for the graduates of lesser skill or from lesser law schools. However, the reality is that the work that these lawyers do to help common citizens and small businesses address the challenges of day-to-day life through the law calls into the light the relevance of the legal system and lawyers themselves. This is critical work.
Here is where The Rural Lawyer is the most broadly gripping, as the legal profession, let alone rule of law, teeters in precarity. While lawyers view assaults on rule of law as fundamentally threatening to the American democracy, the public at large appears only mildly perturbed. Apparently, for too many Americans, it is unclear what work rule of law is doing for them. In this historical moment, American society holds in the balance the question, “Do we want, value, or believe in law?” Next steps for lawyers, indeed any steps, to help the public answer this question in the affirmative and then fight for the protection of system of laws, appear obscure and daunting. However, not unlike the advice of Anne Lamott’s seminal writing manifesto, Bird by Bird, Professor Haksgaard shows the reader, tenderly yet unflinchingly, a path: go lawyer by lawyer, client by client, and person by person.2 If she is right that rural lawyers can be viewed as “great equalizers in American society,” then perhaps, in this moment, that is some of the most profound work of all. (P. 19.)3
- Daria F. Page & Brian R. Farrell, One Crisis or Two Problems? Disentangling Rural Access to Justice and the Rural Attorney Shortage, 98 Wash. L. Rev. 849 (2023); Legal Servs. Corp., The Justice Gap: The Unmet Civil Legal Needs Of Low–Income Americans (2022).
- Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird (1995).
- Quoting Judy V. Cornett & Heather Bosau, The Myth of the Country Lawyer, 83 Ala. L. Rev. 125, 156 (2020).
