LSAC will lead national convening on solving rural legal deserts
The Law School Admission Council is partnering with several other groups to tackle a problem that has long stymied advocates hoping to increase access to justice: rural legal deserts.
Alongside the Association of American Law Schools and the University of Nebraska College of Law, the LSAC unveiled the partnership in May and invited 300 organizations to join them. That included ABA-accredited law schools, state bar associations, state courts, tribal courts, and national and community organizations who support legal education efforts.
The ABA defines a legal desert as a community with less than one lawyer per 1,000 residents. While they can occur in any location, the impact of limited access to justice is most acutely felt in rural America, tribal communities, frontier regions and economically distressed areas. About 41% of U.S. counties—more than 1,270 of the nation’s 3,100-plus counties and county-equivalents—meet that definition, according to a July State Justice Institute report to the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations, while 54 counties have no resident lawyer at all and another 182 have only one or two.
The LSAC’s initiative includes a three-part webinar series focused on handling challenges while guiding law students toward rural practice; a survey of law school initiatives to address rural needs; and a national convening in November to bring the key partners together in the same room to facilitate the creation of long-term collaborations that support others’ efforts.
“We all know that one convening is not going to solve these issues, but there’s so much good work going on in different spaces,” says Sudha Setty, LSAC’s president and CEO. “So how can we come together, and how can we build that collaboration to last for the long haul? The investment of time and energy is really significant, and it’s not measurable in a year or two. It’s a long journey.”
‘We have a particular niche expertise’
In low-income rural households, 94% of civil legal issues go unresolved each year, according to the LSAC.
“And it’s the core of our democracy, right?” says Angela Winfield, the LSAC’s vice president and chief impact officer. “This is one area where there is a major crisis. It seemed like the right time for us to broaden how we look at access and really bring folks together to start a new and different conversation.”
The convening comes about one year after the Committee on Legal Education and Admissions Reform, a group of chief justices and court administrators, published a report citing legal deserts among the pressing challenges facing the legal profession and listed encouraging rural practice among its recommendations.
The report aligns with the LSAC’s goals, Setty says.
“We have a particular niche expertise. We have the ability to work with so many candidates, see where we need to do more marketing and education in those regions where perhaps there are folks who aspire to law school but are not necessarily thinking it’s the pathway for them,” she adds. “And we have really good information on what motivates people into law school, what it is that they want to do when they go back and serve their communities.”
Additionally, the LSAC has gathered data from about 70 U.S. and 10 Canadian law schools and is sharing information about its work with bar associations, pre-law programs and sometimes high schools and state supreme courts, Setty says.
Other research looks at the journeys of people who grew up in rural communities.
“We’re using data to really understand. What does it mean? Have they ever met an attorney? Did they have access to broadband or internet? How well were the schools funded?” Winfield says. “All of those things can either lead someone to thinking that law is or is not for them.”
The convening is “very driven towards motion, purposeful meaningful activity that can be measured,” Winfield adds. “We really want to have a fulsome conversation about how we can better solve for the lack of access in rural communities.”
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