Rural Law Opportunity Programs
Commentary by Anthony Schutz
Five years ago, the University of Nebraska College of Law started a collaborative project with Wayne State College, Chadron State College, and the University of Nebraska at Kearney to get more lawyers in rural places. Dubbed the “Rural Law Opportunity Program” (in the case of Chadron and Wayne) and the “Kearney Law Opportunity Program (in the case of UNK), this program was modeled on the long-standing Rural Health Opportunities Program in Nebraska, which is part of the Rural Health Initiative.
The program tries to attract students from rural areas to the undergraduate colleges with their law-college affiliation and undergraduate benefits, including undergraduate scholarships. The law college is also seeking to attract students from undergraduate institutions that rural students often attend. The underlying premise is that such students are likely to return to those areas to practice law, and they have a greater capacity to do so if they have little or no undergraduate debt. While there is no formal condition mandating a certain period of rural practice after earning a law degree, rural practice is clearly the expectation. This commentary explains our efforts, some of our outcomes over the last five years, and some adjustments that have been made or are under consideration. It concludes with some thoughts on how the Rural Reconciliation Project relates to the program.
If you are interested in this subject, you should consult Lisa Pruitt, Amanda Kool, Lauren Sudeall, Michele Statz, Danielle Conway, and Hannah Haksgaard’s Legal Deserts. And you should read Michele Statz’s recent work on the importance of lawyers to A2J efforts. All of our Rural Review pieces on A2J can be found with this tag.
Undergraduate Efforts and Outcomes
As part of the program, the undergraduate colleges provide scholarship funding and use the program as a recruiting tool. The law college provides programming to the undergraduate colleges and provides these students an easier path to law school by defining minimum LSAT and GPA marks that, if met, give them automatic admission. Students are not required to attend our law college, but we clearly have a matriculation goal in mind with our work at the undergraduate level. We also have broader goals. We want to reveal the legal profession as a career opportunity to students who might not have otherwise considered it. And we want to get interested students excited about law school with a full understanding of what law school and rural practice entail. We stand a much better chance of long-term success (getting lawyers to rural areas) if students proceed down this path with as much knowledge as possible about where they are headed.
To accomplish those undergraduate goals, the law college does five things at the undergraduate level:
(1) We bring the program students to the law school once a year to attend law school classes and see appellate oral arguments. The law college hosts the Nebraska Supreme Court and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in alternating years. Program students attending these events also sit in on a law-school class, get building tours, meet our admissions team, and meet other law students who are interested in rural practice.
(2) The program director (me) visits each school once a year to meet students, sometimes with other law students or other faculty members. The content of these meetings changes from year to year to provide variety and give the students a broad understanding of law school and legal practice. Sometimes we talk about the law college and what we are doing on the rural front for legal training and scholarship. Sometimes we talk about rural practice with a group of local attorneys. Sometimes we focus on specific local subjects where we explore the law and lawyers' roles (the 2019 floods in northeast Nebraska was an example of that). We have also taken students to CLE events near their colleges to meet lawyers practicing in those areas. The undergraduate students sometimes accompany me on trips with law students that exist as part of my water or agricultural law courses.
(3) The law college assists the undergraduate schools in summer placements (internships or employment) to get undergraduate students exposed to rural practice.
(4) We provide LSAT preparation assistance.
(5) Finally, our admissions office is heavily involved in this effort, providing them with information on their law-school application and the process, as well as providing them with our general recruiting material.
The undergraduate institutions also provide robust pre-law programs that expose students to the elements of legal analysis, alongside their general studies curricula.
Many of the students who have gone through the undergraduate program have come to law school. The program started with most students as entering freshmen, so we are just now in the first year of our first full wave of students who had law school as part of their plans.
A few students decided not to attend law school during the course of their undergraduate studies or upon graduation. This is understandable and, in fact, consistent with the goals of the program. With a full understanding of what law school entails, students are making a much more well-informed choice than they would have made in the absence of our efforts.
We have had a small number of students go to other law schools after our investment in their undergraduate experience. The reasons vary. Financial hurdles remain when students are selecting law schools. Though we are very competitive on costs, we do not have dedicated scholarship funding for these students, which would help the program.
Eligibility criteria at the point of matriculation were a hurdle for a few students. The parameters of admissions criteria (and the accompanying pressure they put on comparative measures) may be changing. Those sorts of changes may benefit programs like this and our close relationships with the undergraduate institutions may allow us to find better indicators of potential student success for this student population.
Geography poses an interesting issue to law-school selection as well. There are law schools that are geographically closer to some of the undergraduate colleges than ours. Selecting one of those schools is consistent with the underlying premise of the program: these students are attached to the place they grew up. Other schools are farther away. Some students want to “get away” for their legal studies before settling back home, especially if they didn’t venture far for their undergraduate training. While we think these other schools are unlikely to provide a better legal education with access to the Nebraska legal community and their future peers, the desire is understandable.
Law-school selection is, of course, a complex choice. And the different ways in which a school may match a particular student’s preferences are difficult to predict. The best we can do is make our case to program students for law school generally, and our law school in particular. We continue to maintain contact with students who have matriculated elsewhere to support them and encourage their ultimate return to rural practice in Nebraska.
From a programmatic perspective, matriculation to a different law school is disappointing, but not devastating. We have made an investment in these students’ undergraduate education, expecting they would come here. But, more broadly, our goal is to get them to law school. And the undergraduate schools got them to and through college with little or no undergraduate debt. These students are still more likely to return to rural areas than the average law student. So we still think we have helped these students and, hopefully, the rural bar. Over time, we expect our matriculation rate to get even stronger, as our program law students interact with program undergraduate students, and as our program alumni base grows.
Overall, we have been successful at the undergraduate level in educating students about law school and rural practice and getting students to our law school. One potential adjustment that may occur is in undergraduate recruitment. One goal we have is to bring people to the legal profession who might not be considering it. As it stands, we may not be bringing students to the legal profession who would not have otherwise gotten here. This is a function of the program’s current focus on college entry, which effectively means we are seeking high-school seniors for the program. Those who express interest are likely to already be familiar with the profession and, perhaps, would go down the path of legal study without our efforts. So we are working with the undergraduate colleges to consider the idea of expanding our attention to 4th and 5th-semester students in various undergraduate disciplines who may not have considered law school or rural practice at all. Frankly, this idea is attractive to me because that was how I became interested in law school. There is also significant diversity in rural populations and the undergraduate cohorts coming from those places. To the extent those students are unfamiliar with the legal profession, a program like this may not resonate with them as high-school seniors.
Law School Efforts, Partnerships, and Opportunities
Since the program is in its fifth year, we are just now at the point where program students have matriculated to law school in significant numbers. We currently have six students who are finishing up their 1L year. Four more students are 2Ls or 3Ls who had partial program experiences as undergrads. And we had one student who came to us after one year of the undergraduate program who has graduated.
Program students join our broader student body, which includes other students who are interested in rural practice. Our primary means of identifying and communicating with these students is through a student organization called Greater Nebraska Connections. We encourage all of our program entrants and any other students interested in rural practice to join. I am their faculty advisor.
One upside of Greater Nebraska Connections and its development over time is student familiarity. I am a familiar face to program students by the time they matriculate. Because we draw on the student organization to assist with undergraduate programming, many of the 2L and 3L students that program entrants meet may also be familiar faces. And the student organization will also include alumni of the program entrants’ undergraduate institutions. The hope is that this familiarity will help with the transition to law school. More broadly, these students also get to know one another and build connections that will last throughout their careers (along with the set of connections law school typically fosters).
Greater Nebraska Connections also puts together speaker panels and makes outreach and service contributions of its own. From an administrative perspective, this is a self-selected audience that our Career Development Office can speak to when rural employment and research opportunities arise. I often get calls from rural lawyers looking for good law students or former students who are early in their careers. This group and its alumni are our primary audiences for these opportunities.
External groups are also a key part of our law school effort. The Nebraska State Bar Association has created the Greater Nebraska Rural Opportunities Committee which is part of its Rural Practice Initiative. This group provides a professional organization for our students as they move into practice, and is a suitable place to develop mentoring relationships. The group is also continuously working on issues related to rural legal practice. We are currently considering the use of survey and interview data to get a better understanding of legal-service deficiencies in rural areas and the extent of anticipated attrition in the ranks of an increasingly aging rural bar. With this information, I hope the law school will be able to further develop its preparatory programs for students interested in rural practice. This information may also inform the selection of practice areas and help focus public support where it is most needed.
The initiative also sponsors spring and fall associate and clerkship placement-interview events where interested lawyers can interview interested students. The initiative and our Career Development Office collaborate on getting our students to those interviews. Both are also key figures in the Public Service Rural Practice Loan Repayment Assistance Program, administered by the Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy.
Our program of legal study contains a number of existing pathways that are designed to serve students interested in rural practice. We have a solo and small firm "program of concentrated study" that we recommend for students wanting to pursue rural practice. This program provides a transcript notation upon its completion, but the primary emphasis is on preparing students for solo and small firm practice. Students must complete a course in Law Office Management, one of our clinics, and courses designed to provide the building blocks for a general rural practice (ranging from Criminal Procedure to Business Associations, Tax, and Family Law).
Beyond the solo/small firm concentration, we have other concentration programs that can be deployed in rural areas. Agriculture and natural resources is one that I'm particularly fond of. But our offerings in real estate, estate planning, and business are quite appropriate to rural practice, which often may involve specialization. With better data on the nature and place of rural needs, we hope we can get students more advice on programs that we can design that allow students to better serve those places.
Clinical offerings and management-skill courses are important aspects of training rural lawyers, where smaller firms without dedicated junior-associate development programs dominate the structure of service delivery. Our program of legal education retains its orientation toward a sophisticated understanding of law and legal institutions. We are, after all, a scholarly group teaching complex material with the goal of enhancing the fundamental skill of professional critical analysis. But the last two decades have seen growing and healthy attention to teaching this in experiential formats that make students more practice-ready. This, in turn, can be made to serve rural areas in the hands of a law school that is attentive to the relevant unique attributes of rural practice.
Field placements are an emerging aspect of experiential learning that could be made to benefit rural areas. Some adjustments that may benefit such programs are paid externships (where students can earn income while earning credit), as well as making arrangements for student housing. Unlike field placements in urban areas, sometimes it is not as simple as finding a willing employer. Housing and transportation may be issues as well. Land-grant law schools are, perhaps, uniquely situated to tend to these needs through remote campuses and collaboration with other public service providers.
Rural practice can also present unique challenges to students as they take up the practice and, often, become community leaders. Things like maintaining personal wellness and developing professional identity (e.g., with attention to leadership skills like relationship building, establishing credibility, cross-cultural competency, and strategic thinking, as well as professionalism) are emerging as important elements of professional legal education that schools like ours include as part of our program. Employers are increasingly interested in seeing these changes, and most agree that the profession is in need of more attention to these things. As we help students enter rural practice, we would do well to consider the likelihood that the early years of practice involve a significant demand for them, while longer-term practice and community presence may involve significantly different contexts that raise unique challenges or opportunities.
In the next few years, as we move into the phase of graduating RLOP and KLOP students, we will be closely monitoring our outcomes and seeking to improve our work. I anticipate the results will be a mixed and complicated bag. Sometimes one’s willingness to return “home” or otherwise locate in a rural area does not mature until a number of years beyond graduation. Sometimes an eagerness to be in such places fades with actual experience (though we hope we have students adequately prepared for what rural practice will be like). Changes in the office structure of urban law firms and their willingness to serve rural areas are also anticipated, and some of our RLOP and KLOP students may be attracted to such positions. Technological changes may also facilitate legal service provision without a lawyer’s physical presence, and some of our RLOP and KLOP students might be at the forefront of those changes. So time will tell us a great deal about the challenges facing rural areas, but I remain hopeful that our contribution will be meaningful.
This Project’s Relevance
Some challenges facing rural practice are beyond the reach of legal education. That is, the challenge of getting lawyers to rural areas extends to the broader state of rural communities. These places are facing challenges related to water quality, health care, education, and telecommunications to name a few. And the current slate of local revenue tools they have is constantly in a state of jeopardy. The politics of "rural" and "urban" also loom large, given the political geography of states like Nebraska. So I hasten to add that the trees we are looking at so closely are part of a much larger forest that must inform our efforts. Practically, recruiting highly sought-after lawyers to rural areas is quite possibly still going to be difficult even with competitive pay (perhaps adjusted for costs of living) and mentorship.
That’s one reason why this project interested me. As we bring together academics in multiple disciplines that have something to contribute to rural issues, my hope was and is that we will contribute to the larger dynamics of rural policy. Jess, who is a much better scholar than I am, is such an important piece of this. And we find ourselves in wonderful company, alongside all of the others we have worked with and hopefully helped lift over the past two years of programs and Rural Review work. We hope many more will join us in future years.
This, of course, feeds back to the law school and the students. From a legal-training perspective, this project is valuable because it helps scholars and teachers in law, and many other disciplines, better understand rural places and issues. And from a student perspective, it provides information that students can learn and opportunities for our students to become involved. We hired our third research assistant last week from a group of very good students who were all passionate about rural places. In the market for law students, we hope this also helps us attract students and future leaders who will ultimately devote their time to rural places.
To conclude, there is no silver bullet to rural problems, including access to legal services. Innovations like the RLOP and KLOP programs, law-school attentiveness to the differences found in rural settings, and attention to the broader issues in rural places will all contribute to progress. We hope to see these contributions help.
