Key Takeaways

The Need for Greater Speed and Larger Scale Efforts

As innovative and impressive as these new rural legal pipeline initiatives are, they remain relatively small and rarely focus on criminal law. Absent some significant efforts to expand their scope and scale, these programs cannot graduate enough new rural lawyers to make up for rural lawyer retirements. And without a commitment to criminal law pipelines, there is no guarantee that rural communities will have enough prosecutors and indigent defense providers providing prompt, competent, and conflict-free representation.

For example, the Nebraska State Bar Association predicted that, between 2022 and 2027, 108 attorneys from Nebraska’s rural counties would retire from practice, leaving 16 rural counties with no lawyers and 18 counties with fewer than four lawyers.106 To produce 108 new rural lawyers by 2027, RLOP would have needed to enroll 162 students at the University of Nebraska Law School between 2021 and 2024.107 As of Spring 2025, the program had graduated 11 students have from the law school, with a yield of seven in rural practice, and there were a further 22 RLOP students in law school and approximately 70 in college.108 And there is no programmatic focus on rural criminal practice. Meanwhile, Nebraska is in desperate need of public defenders and county attorneys.109As of June of 2024, “[s]ome public defender/county attorney jobs [had] been vacant for six months in rural counties without a single applicant.”110 And in rural Hall County, Nebraska, the public defender has been trying for more than two years to hire a juvenile public defender.111

The Need for Comprehensive Pipeline Programs

To cultivate people to serve as prosecutors and public defenders in rural areas, program must combine increased rural access to higher education, pathways to law school, financial support, relevant training, exposure, and financial incentives. Very few of the programs discussed above provide this type of comprehensive pipeline, education, and financial that have proved most successful in other contexts, particularly medicine. Under the leadership of Shawn Leisinger, Associate Dean for Centers and External Programs and Externship Director, Washburn University School of Law has adopted a variety of programs to guide students toward rural legal practice:

  • The Rural Legal Practice Initiative connects Kansas State University pre-law students to Washburn Law faculty and alumni for mentoring and experiential learning opportunities.112

     

  • The Law School Early Admissions Program (LEAP) “3+3” program allows students to finish college in three years and have their first year of law school coursework count toward their undergraduate degree. The program saves students a year of undergraduate tuition and living expenses, covers the tuition of their first year of law school (potentially over $28,000113), and provides at least $5,000 in scholarships for their second and third years.

     

  • The Rural Externship Program, backed by the Hansen Foundation, provides up to six hours of law school credit and tuition, plus a $5,000 stipend to cover travel and housing costs, to students who have summer externships in rural northwestern Kansas.

     

  • The Third Year Anywhere (TYA) Program allows law students to complete their final year of law school in the area where they intend to practice (including rural areas) splitting their credit hours between a part-time externship and online coursework.

    They also have plans to extend their pipeline programs into high school and community colleges. More such programs, which link pipelines to college with pipelines to law school and surround students with educational and financial assistance are desperately needed.

The Need for Significant Public and Private Investment

All of the programs described in this chapter have a hefty price tag. Scaling rural legal pipelines—and particularly rural criminal practice pipelines —to meet present and emerging needs will require significant public and private investment.

Federal rural higher education pipeline investment far outstrips the creditable but still patchwork and small scale efforts in the legal space. The 2025 Federal Reconciliation Bill made $50 billion available to states through the Rural Health Transformation Program. Eligible initiatives extended well beyond educational pipelines, but many states notably highlighted their plans for pipelines, with some beginning in fifth grade.[ix]  Generalized rural workforce funding efforts scarcely acknowledge the need for rural legal pipelines. For example, the U.S. Department of Education’s Rural Postsecondary and Economic Development (RPED) grant program, which launched in FY2021, “promotes the development of high-quality career pathways aligned to high-skill, high-wage and in-demand industry sectors and occupations” in rural areas.117 FY2024, the RPED allocated over $44.8 million across 22 pipeline programs in 18 states.118 Some of these 2024 grants specifically proposed plans to increase the number of rural nurses, teachers, and doctors. None proposed pipelines to rural criminal law deserts.119 Rural communities urgently need private and public funding to fill this void.

  • Rural legal education recruitment has failed to keep pace with rural pipelines in healthcare, teaching, and other professions.
  • Rural healthcare pipelines provide excellent models for developing rural legal pipelines.

  • Successful rural professional pipeline programs employ common strategies such as:
    • Pre-college recruitment programs that expose high students to college opportunities, teach them about professional career pathways, and provide academic readiness courses and college campus tours.
    • Coaching that helps rural students navigate the complicated application processes for college admissions and financial aid.
    • College-to-graduate school partnerships that promote rural professional practice in areas such as healthcare or teaching.120
    • Rural immersion educational components.121
    • Financial assistance with the costs of college and graduate school.

  • While high school legal pipelines (like moot court competitions and legal academies) often include criminal law topics, they may not reach rural communities. To address this issue, high school pipeline programs should take place in rural schools or close to rural communities. Sponsoring organizations should monitor their participant lists to ensure their programs are reaching rural communities.

     

  • Emerging college-to-law-school pipeline programs are small but innovative. These programs should be scaled up and researchers should study their outcomes. Current program outputs are insufficient to help address the growing disparity between new bar admission and lawyer retirements.

     

  • Law schools must incorporate rural criminal legal education and career placement opportunities. Law schools should offer rural practice curricula that address the practical and ethical challenges of rural practice. They should also develop high-quality opportunities for experiential learning in rural criminal law settings

     

  • The legal community must create rural criminal practice pathways. Coursework, externships, law clinics, and career development programs must connect law student with rural practitioners. But fellowships and incubator projects are equally important strategies for recruiting new rural criminal lawyers.

     

  • The federal government woefully neglects rural criminal law deserts (and legal deserts more generally) especially as compared to the federal investment in rural healthcare shortage areas.  The federal government should launch parallel programs that address rural lawyer shortages.

Tips for Building and Expanding Rural Criminal Law Pipelines

The programs described in this Chapter are working models for attracting students to professional practice in rural areas. Educational pipelines for healthcare providers are long-standing and have been proven successful. Emerging pipelines for rural lawyers remain too few and too small to reliably generate enough criminal lawyers to green rural criminal legal deserts. States and universities must expand educational pipelines to rural criminal law practice using the following approaches.

Coordinate Rural Pipelines

Law schools should create Rural Law programs, with faculty and staff who can coordinate at each stage of the pipeline. A Rural Law program can recruit rural undergraduates to law school, provide information about scholarships and educational  pathways, and coordinate a structured rural practice sequence that includes classroom, experiential, and networking opportunities related to rural practice. They should also develop relationships with rural employers who can provide summer and post-graduate placements in rural criminal practice. 

Law schools should think broadly about partnerships. Pipeline programs described in this Chapter use both public and private funding sources, for example. Universities can partner with state agencies and commissions dedicated to workforce development, rural economic development, or access to justice. They can create collaboratives with other universities, community colleges, and regional colleges to develop joint curricula and build reciprocity.122  Local leaders, including elected officials, bar association leaders, and community advocates, are other key partners for universities to engage.

The University of Kansas Medical Center’s Office of Rural Medical Education is a similar hub for outreach to medical students, rural practitioners, and university administrators.123  The Office’s Rural Medical Education Network has six regional directors, who are practitioners who help coordinate student placements in their regions.124  This program is fairly robust because of KU’s required rural preceptorship (clinical placement) for all medical students. But for pipelines of any scale, both universities and students can benefit from maintaining networks of rural practitioners from each region of a state. 

Lower Barriers to Education

When developing pipeline programs, universities should identify students’ practical barriers to law school and rural practice and design programs that strategically lower those barriers. Universities should hear from rural residents firsthand about which factors affect their decision to pursue higher education or professional practice in their areas. Likely barriers are noted above: information, distance, and money.

First, young people from rural areas may know relatively few adults who went to college or law school, so may not consider those options or be intimidated by their requirements. Texas A&M’s Rural Student Success Initiative therefore both showcases professional career paths to attract rural students to higher education and provides them with coaching and other tools to help them apply.125 More universities should have these types of programs to make the prospect of going to college, and on to law school, more comprehensible.

Second, since rural residents are likely to live farther away from university campuses, universities should invest in bringing their staff and alumni to rural high school and college students, and in bringing those students to their campuses, to court, and to special events. They should partner with regional alumni, bar associations, and courts so rural students learn about practice options in their area. Universities can supplement in-person visits with online recruiting fairs and admissions coaching.

Third, rural residents are more likely to need financial aid, so universities should provide financial assistance for exam preparation, admissions applications, tuition, and living costs. For example, the University of Nebraska’s Rural Health Opportunities Program and Rural Law Opportunities Program both cover undergraduate tuition at state colleges and make graduate school admission automatic.126 Washburn University reduces students’ costs through its expedited degree program, offers law school tuition scholarships, and provides a stipend specifically for rural externs’ travel and housing costs.

Universities should also consider how racial and ethnic minority status affects rural students’ decisions to pursue higher education. They should develop programs like those from Washington’s Heritage University that cultivate diverse lawyers to serve their local communities.

Provide Wraparound, Continuous Support

Ideally, pipeline programs should address all of the barriers noted above—not provide only admissions coaching, or local mentoring, or financial aid, but package these supports together. They should include both classroom and practical training, and development of a student’s professional network. And they should ensure as much continuity as possible before, during, and after law school, to keep students in the rural law pipeline. Continuity can be achieved through a dedicated rural law resource hub; a multi-year rural scholars program with financial perks; long-term mentors; and options to extended successful externships into additional credit hours and post-graduate placements.

Highlight Opportunities in Rural Criminal Legal Deserts

Pipeline programs should have a criminal law component, if not focus. For example, law schools should invite rural prosecutors and defense lawyers (particularly alumni) to speak with students at networking events and to serve as mentors. Law schools should have rural criminal law clinics (like Texas Tech’s Caprock Regional Public Defender Office and Clinic) and practicums with rural practitioners serving as part-time faculty. Law schools should partner with prosecutor and public defender offices on filling those offices’ vacancies with new graduates and alumni. In sum, law schools should be informing students, at every opportunity, that rural criminal legal deserts need them, and that the students will be supported in launching their careers in those areas.  

Expand Federal Support

Finally, Congress should expand programs like the U.S. Department of Education’s Rural Postsecondary and Economic Development (RPED) grant program to fund more rural pipeline programs and to target rural, criminal legal deserts.127 RPED currently funds projects to recruit, for example, nurses and teachers. Federal agencies should offer grants to recruit criminal lawyers and measure the effectiveness of legal pipeline programs.