By Victoria Wicks
As South Dakota’s lawyers gravitate toward larger cities, rural towns and counties are left with few, or no, legal services. Experts in the field say having lawyers in town helps the area to stay alive, keeping residents from having to travel to find legal assistance.
A bill currently coursing through the state legislature seeks to replace existing rural attorneys as they retire by encouraging law students to practice in small towns.
Small-town lawyers are portrayed in movies as part of the community, but often on the fringes, taking on unpopular causes. Think Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird or Paul Biegler in Anatomy of a Murder, played by Jimmy Stewart. Biegler gives up a career as a prosecutor for private practice so he can hang up a “gone fishing” sign whenever he feels like it.
In this scene, his assistant, Parnell, tells him about the big case that’s about to drop in his lap.
PARNELL: “The lieutenant goes to Quill’s place and plugs Mr. Quill about five times, which causes Mr. Quill to promptly die of lead poisoning.”
PAUL: “Well, when did all this happen?”
PARNELL: “A couple of nights ago. If you hadn’t been out fishing in a rowboat in some god-forsaken backwater, you’d have known about it.”
Lawyers are a stabilizing force in a small town, but South Dakota’s smaller communities are losing theirs.
Before the Senate Judiciary Committee, State Senator Mike Vehle lays out the problem. “Currently 65 percent of all the attorneys in South Dakota are in four communities: Sioux Falls, Rapid City, Pierre, and Aberdeen.”
Vehle then introduces a solution: tuition assistance for law students willing to practice full-time for five years in a rural area.
Vehle says students annually receive one and a half times the current tuition at USD law school, to be paid in part by the host county.
“If you want an attorney in your county, you’re going to have to ante up. You got to put up 35 percent of the cost,” Vehle says. “Now it’s also written in there that you can work with the municipality or the school district or any other nonprofit organization to help pool your approximate $6,000.”
He says the state will pay the other 65 percent. The four-year pilot project is available to 16 students.
The proposal is contained in Senate Bill 218, which has garnered some notable support.
SENATOR CRAIG TIESZEN: “Good morning, Mr. Chief Justice.”
CHIEF JUSTICE DAVID GILBERTSON: “Good morning, Mr. Chairman. It’s an honor to be here today. As Senator Vehle knows, I don’t appear all that often on bills, but this is one, I think, that goes to the heart of the legal profession.”
David Gilbertson says after he was appointed Chief Justice of the South Dakota Supreme Court, he visited every county seat to assess the status of the legal profession:
“Driving around the state, I started thinking about who used to be in this town, be it Gettysburg, Faulkton, Phillip, Britton, and in virtually every town, I knew attorneys who weren’t there anymore.”
Gilbertson says he first noticed the problem almost 40 years ago.
“A lot of these folks were of the World War II era,” he says. “They got out of the Army; they went to law school in the early ’50s; they set up a law practice. But by the time I get out of law school in 1975, they’re starting to look at retirement. They’re aging out. So they close their practices, and in all too many cases, nobody’s there to take over.”
A small practice probably won’t pay the same as one in a larger town, but Gilbertson says the cost of living is lower and quality of living is higher in rural areas.
But that lower income level is a handicap when it comes to paying back education loans.
“The major problem now is debt,” the chief justice says. “When I got out of law school, it was possible to work your way through law school, and I graduated debt-free. And it wasn’t that hard, because tuition in those days was about fifteen hundred dollars a year. Now it’s probably closer to twelve thousand five hundred.”
Senator Jean Hunhoff asks a question that zeroes in on a means by which rural lawyers can compete with big-city law firms. “Do law firms do anything by e-technology so that they can service clients in the rural areas using any two-way video or anything like that?”
“Approximately half the counties have i-TV, which is a two-way TV system,” Gilbertson responds. “We had to discontinue the program in the budget cuts two years ago, but most counties have that.”
The Chief Justice says technology can’t replace all aspects of personal service. “If you have a client that’s in jail, you can’t use those. You have to drive physically to that place and consult with that client.”
But he says when state court files go online, as federal files already have, that online service will diminish the inconvenience of distance. “We are working on electronic filing and hope to within two years have that. So that would also be available. So if an attorney was in a non-county seat town, they would not have to get in the car and drive to the county seat anymore.”
The State Bar of South Dakota is working with the Unified Judicial System to get young lawyers into small towns. Executive Director Tom Barnett says those lawyers play vital roles.
“A lawyer in a small town is almost automatically a leader. The Chamber of Commerce needs their expertise, which is provided for free,” Barnett says. “Our lawyers serve on school boards and city councils, or they serve as the local lawyer, so it’s a tremendous resource.”
Barnett says the State Bar has a young lawyers’ section that matches older rural attorneys with prospective candidates to replace them.
A rural attorney who wears all those hats, not to mention handling the occasional sensational murder case that turns out not to be so black and white, could be too busy to shut the office door and go fishing. That’s if the legislature passes the bill. It next goes to the Appropriations Committee for financial approval before it’s presented to the full Senate.