Rural Legal Markets

Authors

• Elizabeth Chambliss

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Research on rural access to justice tends to appeal to a romantic conception of rural lawyers as accessible generalists who serve the public through pro bono, low bono, and community service, and some characterize rural private practice as public interest work. Many commentators call for law school, bar, and government programs to attract law graduates to rural practice and at least 15 states have implemented such programs. Yet we know very little about modern rural legal markets or the recipes for sustainable private practice in rural places. The last statewide study of rural private practice was conducted in the 1980s. National data show that many solo and small firm practitioners are struggling, and some evidence suggests that rural practice is especially financially challenging. The broader literature on rural America paints a stark picture of economic decline. This literature raises questions about the centrality of efforts to increase the number of private practitioners as a strategy for meeting the legal needs of low-income rural communities.

This mixed methods study investigates the contours of private practice in rural South Carolina and the role of rural private practitioners in serving low-income clients and communities. It focuses on identifying the ingredients of sustainable rural practice and the incentives for rural practitioners to engage in pro bono and low bono work. The study has four main findings. First, rural private practitioners play a limited role in serving low-income clients and communities. Less than 25% of South Carolina’s rural practitioners practice in the state’s poorer rural counties, and some live an hour or more from the town in which they practice. Most report doing limited pro bono and discounted work. Second, specialization is a key ingredient for successful rural practice. New lawyers may take whatever clients they can get, but over time most practitioners become more specialized and less accessible, and some specialties can be lucrative, such as personal injury and real estate. Third, personal injury cases can be an important means of subsidizing less profitable work, but personal injury work has become more commoditized as the result of mass market advertising, making local ties less important to plaintiffs and making low-margin practice sustained by periodic personal injury cases less viable. Finally, family ties play an important role in attracting and sustaining rural private practitioners, raising questions about the scalability of recruiting lawyers without local ties.

Rather than providing incentives for private practitioners based on location, the study suggests that we look for ways to directly subsidize specific types of service based on evidence of legal need. In South Carolina, for instance, this might include offering health care benefits to lawyers for part-time public employment; raising the rates for criminal defense, guardian ad litem, and other public appointments; paying lawyers to provide on-site assistance to self-represented parties at county courthouses; and training other types of providers to provide specific types of assistance. We also should consider new ways of marketing flat-fee, routine legal services to make them more accessible to consumers and capture economies of scale: for instance, by allowing private practitioners to set up at Walmart and other retail locations; and encouraging the development of online service and referral platforms.

DOI

10.37419/LR.V12.I3.1

First Page

961

Last Page

1023

Recommended Citation

Elizabeth Chambliss, Rural Legal Markets, 12 Tex. A&M L. Rev. 961 (2025).
Available at: https://doi.org/10.37419/LR.V12.I3.1