Rural Legal Markets

The U.S. legal profession tends to appeal to a romantic conception of rural lawyers as accessible generalists who serve their communities through pro bono and community service, and some characterize rural private practice as public interest work. Many commentators call for programs to attract law graduates to rural locations and at least fifteen states have implemented such programs. Yet we know very little about modern rural legal markets or the role of rural private practitioners in serving low-income clients.

This mixed methods study investigates the contours of private practice in rural South Carolina. It finds, first, that rural private practitioners play a limited role in serving low-income clients. Less than 25% of South Carolina’s rural practitioners practice in the state’s poorer rural counties and most report doing limited pro bono work. Second, specialization is a key ingredient for successful rural practice. New lawyers may take whatever clients they can get, but most practitioners quickly become more specialized, 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 a central 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. We also should consider new ways of marketing flat-fee, routine legal services to make them more geographically accessible and capture economies of scale.