Nearly half of the United States' counties have fewer than one attorney for every one thousand residents and the coronavirus pandemic threatens to intensify the rural area-centered problem of "legal deserts," according to panelists at a recent American Bar Association conference.

Of the 3,100 counties in the United States, 1,300 have fewer than one attorney for every thousand residents, and 54 counties have no attorneys at all, according to a legal deserts analysis that was a new addition to the ABA's annual "Profile of the Legal Profession" report. The report found that legal deserts are common in rural areas.

"Most people think of the access to justice challenges as just in urban areas, and that's just not true," ABA President Judy Perry Martinez said in a Tuesday panel discussion on the findings from the report hosted by the ABA.

On average, there are four attorneys for every 1,000 residents, the report found, but they tend be highly concentrated in big cities or in state capitals.

Even in states with high attorney populations like California, which has 168,000 attorneys overall, most attorneys are concentrated in urban areas. New York state, for example, has 184,000 of the country's 1.3 million attorneys, but 117,000 of them are based in New York City, according to the report.


"As a nation, if we value [rural] communities and all the things that they provide for us ... then having lawyers in these communities is going to be something we're going to have to look at, or those maps are going to look a whole lot worse," said Lisa R. Pruitt, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law.

The panelists, which also included former South Dakota State Bar Association President Patrick Goetzinger and Georgia State College of Law's Center for Access to Justice Director Lauren Sudeall, resisted the idea that the lack of attorneys in rural areas was due to a lack of demand or a byproduct of low population density.

People in rural areas, Pruitt said, need attorneys for the same reasons people in urban or suburban areas do, such as drawing up wills or defending against criminal charges. Rather, the presence of legal deserts are often connected with larger problems facing rural communities.

"There's a feedback loop in a community," Pruitt said, noting that attorneys are reluctant to move to a community if they won't be able to send their children to good schools or if the local economy doesn't have opportunities for their spouses. Legal deserts also tend to overlap with areas that also lack public transit options, quality health care and reliable internet, she noted. Looking at legal deserts "in a vacuum" is insufficient, she said.

Goetzinger noted that having a lawyer on Main Street, however, could help a local economy and be part of an effort to revitalize a downtown area, bringing in additional traffic. Small-town attorneys often also become community leaders, he added, and can have additional positive effects beyond just providing legal services.

Panelists noted that the technology upgrades that courts and attorneys are currently implementing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic might in the long run help legal services reach further into rural America.

However, since many rural attorneys are older, the pandemic might also push many to retire rather than invest in unfamiliar technology, causing an exodus from the rural bar and deepening the problem, panelists said.

Sudeall also noted that technological upgrades for courts and attorneys are only half of the puzzle. "Even if rural courts do have these capabilities, a lot of their constituents do not," she said. Depending on how systems are implemented, she said, more technology might make legal services less accessible to vulnerable populations, not more.

There have been some successful programs aimed at addressing the issue of legal deserts, including a program in South Dakota that recruits attorneys to set up shop in key rural districts. Attorneys who participate agree to work in those communities for at least five years.

"What we've done is create legal oases," Goetzinger explained. Of the five attorneys who have completed their five year contracts so far, he said, three have chosen to stay, which he takes as an encouraging sign of the program's potential to make lasting change in the state.

Panelists also agreed that law schools should be part of the solution.

"We ... don't always do a good job teaching students about the business of law," Sudeall said. That type of education is important for rural attorneys running their own firms, as is education in how to be a generalist, she said.

Sudeall also advocated that states should look at creative approaches to legal deserts that might go beyond lawyers.

"[The pandemic] may really force us to answer some hard questions about how and where lawyers add value," she said. In some cases, she said, it might be more effective to rely on legal navigators or other professionals, rather than trying to recruit attorneys.

Overall, she said, more research is needed to really understand the needs of rural communities.

"I worry that if we come up with all these policies and programs on a high level without looking at what people want ... the solutions won't be very effective," she said.

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--Editing by Katherine Rautenberg.

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the number of residents in an attorney density statistic. This error has been corrected.