Ohio’s rural areas need more attorneys. A new initiative aims to build a pipeline

Today from the Ohio Newsroom, the rural attorney shortage. Support comes from the James at Ohio State, cancer. For some, it's one of life's fiercest foes, but not at the James, where a team of nearly 300 specialists and over 1,500 researchers are working together to create a cancer-free world. Support comes from Ohio CASA. Ohio CASA's mission is to ensure children experiencing abuse and neglect, have a caring, trained adult in their corner. Information about CASA volunteer work is at Ohio's C-A-S-A.org. I'm Kendall Crawford. Legal help can be hard to come by in Ohio. A whopping 78 out of Ohio's 88 counties do not have enough attorneys to meet their residents' needs, according to the Ohio State Bar Association. In Northwest Ohio, the situation could get even more severe as many practicing attorneys near retirement. A coalition of legal organizations and law schools are working to ensure someone's there to fill the gap. Here to tell us more is Wood County Common Pleas Judge Matt Rieger. Hi, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. So you've volunteered at legal clinics before that work with a lot of community members who need legal help but can't necessarily afford an attorney. Tell us about some of the struggles that they've shared with you in trying to obtain representation. When I ran the clinic, we did it once a month at my church. People would show up. I know some of the things that usually involved divorce or disillusion, questions people didn't know. You know, today in our court, over 50% of the people seeking a disillusion are representing themselves because either they can't find an attorney, they can't afford an attorney, they don't have access to an attorney. So the issues that come up are multifaceted. But having an attorney in your community. and having access to legal resources is not just about suing somebody or being represented when something goes wrong. It's also about getting advice. The Lawyers Equals Justice Initiative is hoping to fill some of those gaps, and that's going to support four newly licensed lawyers to provide private practice each year. I mean, how is that program going to work and what impact do you hope that it has? Well, I'm hopeful the impact is huge, and I think it has a lot of potential to be huge. So here's what we have. First, you start out with maybe a perception that the rural practice is not going to give me the lucrative or the well-paying job that I'm really hoping for. I go to law school. I incur a lot of debt. How can going to a small town or a rural area pay off that debt?

Taking the fellowship, they're going to get a stipend. And by taking that stipend, they're going to do some pro bono representation. But at the same time, they're provided an office and the ability to build a practice. And then basically, it's almost like a incubator. And so at the end of that time period, they're going to go out and establish their own practice within the community and build upon it. It's pretty staggering when you look at a county, certain counties out there with 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 people, and they have less than one attorney per thousand people. What are the broader effects on a community when legal representation is difficult to find? Oh, well, first of all, think about this, is that... When we find that in a community that has access to legal representation, the stock of rental properties goes up and improves in its quality because they know that they have, these people have access to lawyers. Now, what that means is that when people have access to lawyers, they have access to the resources the law gives them. The legislature makes the laws. The governor signs into law and enforces it. But the fact of the matter is, is that access to those laws sometimes can only come through legal representation. That's Matt Rieger. Wood County Common Pleas, Judge. Thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you very much. That's all today from the Ohio Newsroom. We'll talk with you tomorrow.