With a shortage of rural lawyers reaching crisis proportions, a special judicial task force is recommending financial incentives to encourage attorneys to practice in less populated areas of Kansas to ensure access to legal services.
The committee’s new report released Friday documents the shortage of lawyers in rural Kansas, noting that there are more Kansas attorneys practicing in Kansas City, Missouri, than all of rural Kansas.
“We’re in real crisis mode,” said Supreme Court Justice K.J. Wall, who chaired the 35-member committee that has been studying the issue for about two years.
“We are at least fortunate to see that this crisis can balloon in the coming decade, and we need to take action as soon as possible,” Wall said in an interview.
Wall cautioned that the state is approaching a “constitutional crisis” with more than 40% of the state’s counties having one or fewer attorneys per 1,000 people.
“District court judges are struggling to find qualified attorneys to appoint in cases where the right to counsel is guaranteed by United States and our Kansas Constitution,” Wall said.
“It’s a matter of equity and justice as well if our rural communities cannot give legal representation in comparison to urban markets,” he said.
“That’s an issue that impacts equity and justice in our state,” he said.
The report recommends that the Kansas Legislature adopt an incentive program similar to what other states have done nationally to deal with attorney shortages in rural areas.
The report recommends the state fashion an incentive program similar to the Veterinary Training Program for Rural Kansas and the Kansas Medical Student Loan program.
The program would offer law students a loan to cover law school costs and tuition.
The loan would be forgiven over time, provided the attorney practices law on a full-time basis in rural Kansas and meets a series of requirements.
The report also suggested the creation of a program that would repay all or part of a student loan for eligible rural attorneys not exceeding more than $20,000 a year and no more than $100,000 overall.
The student loan repayment program is for attorneys who have student loans and agree to work in a rural area for financial help repaying their loans.
It could even be an attorney already practicing in an urban area who wants to make a career change.
The bill is still in a draft stage.
The idea of using financial incentives to attract attorneys to rural areas would not be unique to Kansas.
Other states such as South Dakota, Ohio and North Dakota employed similar strategies.
- In North Dakota, the state, the North Dakota State Bar Association and a participating community agree to pay an eligible attorney an incentive of $45,000 to work full-time in the participating community and to live within the community for five years.
- South Dakota created the Rural Attorney Recruitment Program in 2013 to provide a financial incentive to attorneys practicing in rural communities. The program paid roughly a $13,000 yearly incentive to attorneys in return for five continuous years of practice in eligible rural counties or cities. Counties with a population of 10,000 or fewer and cities with a population of 3,500 or fewer were eligible for the program. There have been 32 current and past participants under contract in the program. There are currently 9 active attorneys practicing in rural communities. Eighteen of the 32 participants have graduated out of the program, and 14 of the 18 graduates have stayed in their communities.
- Ohio’s Rural Practice Incentive Program provides loan repayments on behalf of newly licensed attorneys in areas designated as underserved who are employed by the state public defender, the local prosecuting attorney, a county public defender commission or a joint county public defender commission to represent indigent persons. Applicants are required to serve three years for a total repayment amount of $30,000, but they may request to serve for four or five years for a total repayment amount of $40,000 or $50,000, respectively.
The report put the issue facing Kansas in stark terms.
“Rural judges struggle to find attorneys in cases where the right to counsel is guaranteed by constitution or statute – cases where a person’s very liberty or right to parent their child is at stake,” the report said.
“Attorneys are turning away potential clients each week because they cannot meet the demand in their communities,” the report said.
“Residents and local businesses are forced to travel greater distances for legal services or proceed without counsel altogether.
“And the loss of an attorney has a ripple effect that adversely impacts the economic viability and social fabric of rural communities.”
The rural attorney shortage is blamed on a number of factors, including financial barriers where student loan debt is high but is complicated for new rural attorneys because compensation is less competitive and depends more on uncertain production than urban areas.
Rural Kansas attorneys graduating before 1980 reported an average of $9,188 in law school debt and $12,200 in total student loan debt, the report said.
But those who graduated after 2011 reported an average law school debt of $98,032 and total educational debt of $124,614, the report said.
The shortage affects Kansans across the economic strata from major corporations to parents fighting for custody of their kids to couples engaged in divorce proceedings to criminal defendants who need legal aide.
Wall addressed broadly disparate rural legal needs, one for corporations and the other for criminal defendants.
“There are multimillion dollar complex business organizations that operate outside of the metropolitan areas in our state, and they have a need for legal services,” Wall said in an interview.
“Twenty years ago, they often had local counsel that understood what the local economic situation was like, they understood the jurors in their communities far better than anybody coming from a metropolitan area,” he said.
“And now those attorneys just aren’t there anymore,” he said.
“These businesses have to seek help from far-away places, and you lose a lot of advantage in that process,” he said.
Wall noted that criminal cases are everywhere in Kansas.
“You can ask any chief judge in any rural district how difficult it is to find a qualified criminal defense attorney to appoint to those cases and you’ll know that the problem is real,” he said.
When surveyed, 91% of Kansas District Court chief judges agreed that their judicial districts needed more attorneys.
The chief judges were asked to rate attorneys’ ability to meet the needs within their judicial districts on a scale of one to 10. The average score was five.
The report found that in 47 of the state’s 105 counties, the number of attorneys per 1,000 is one or fewer. Two counties in western Kansas have no attorneys.
Overall, there are 16 Kansas counties with three or fewer attorneys and 53 counties with 10 or fewer.
The report also found that the distribution of attorneys across Kansas is disproportionate to how the state’s population is distributed.
While there are 11,179 active Kansas attorneys, about 70% live in Kansas. Of those active attorneys residing in Kansas, about 79% live in urban counties while about only 21% live in rural counties.
It’s problem that not only Kansas is facing.
Many states with large, rural areas have many counties with few lawyers.
A 2020 report by the American Bar Association found 40% of all counties in the United States – 1,272 of 3,141 – have less than one lawyer per 1,000 residents.
New York State, for instance, has more lawyers than any state in the country, but it also has Orleans County – on Lake Ontario between Buffalo and Rochester – with 31 lawyers for 40,000 residents, or fewer than one lawyer per 1,000 residents, according to the ABA report.
Texas, with 93,000 lawyers – the third-most of any state – has 254 counties. Nearly half have less than one lawyer per 1,000 residents, including six counties with no lawyers at all, according to the ABA report.
The issue in Kansas is exacerbated by the aging population of attorneys.
During the last eight years, the total attorney population in Kansas has grown but the active-attorney population has decreased.
The report said the trend is likely to worsen because the attorney population in Kansas – compared to national averages – is older and closer to retirement – a scenario that is “especially true” in rural Kansas.
“The demographics say we might be standing on a cliff,” Wall said.
In Kansas, the median age of our active attorneys is 51, meaning half of the active
attorneys in the state are younger than 51 and half are older than 51.
In urban Kansas, the median age of active attorneys is 51 but in rural Kansas, the median age is 55.
“This data suggests the active attorney population in Kansas will continue to decline as more attorneys move from active to inactive or retired status in the coming years,” the report said.
“And rural Kansas will be hit the hardest,” the report said.
The report notes that one in three Kansas attorneys are over the age of 60.
If you removed all attorneys 60 and older from the population for attorneys, 87 counties would have one or fewer attorneys per 1,000 people.
Nine counties would have no attorneys using that metric.
The problem will not be resolved by new attorneys graduating from law school, the report concluded.
The number of people applying to Kansas law schools since 2010 is declining at a rate of 16 to 21 applicants a year.
Further, the number of graduates during the same period has declined at a rate of four to six students annually.
“This reflects trends nationwide as law schools responded to recessionary pressures by reducing class sizes, faculty, and infrastructure,” the report said.
What’s more worrisome is that only about half of employed Kansas law school graduates from the class of 2022 remained in Kansas, the report said.
“We must identify measures to retain more more graduates from KU Law and Washburn Law in Kansas — more specifically in rural Kansas,” the report said.
Current law students at both KU Law and Washburn Law identified measures that would increase their likelihood of practicing in rural Kansas.
The top four measures were all financial incentives, including living stipends, student loan repayment, other financial incentives and tuition assistance.
Law school applications peaked in 2004, when 100,601 people applied to law schools accredited by the American Bar Association.
The number declined to 62,545 applicants in 2022.
“Based on current projections, it is unlikely that the number of law school applications and law school graduates will return to the levels realized in 2004,” the report said.
