Recruitment Strategies: Educational Pipelines and Financial Incentives

A.  The Rural Higher Education Gap

A rural upbringing is among the strongest predictors of rural professional practice.[i] Yet, a peculiar paradox decreases the likelihood that people from rural areas will become doctors, lawyers, or even college graduates. On the one hand, rural public high school graduation rates are roughly comparable to suburban rates (89%) and noticeably higher than urban rates (82%).[ii]  On the other hand, rural students are less likely to attend college than students from other areas. Only 71% of rural students enroll in college, as compared to 76% of suburban students, and 73% of urban students.[iii] 

Absent some intervention, this higher-education gap is likely to grow. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2019, only 25% of rural residents and 22% of “town” residents had a bachelor’s degree, as compared to 37% of urban and suburban residents.[iv] This gap is even larger for younger adults—25% of rural adults between 25 and 34 years old have a bachelor’s degree, compared to 44% among the urban young adults.[v]

No single factor accounts for this rural education gap. Sheer access is one factor. Rural students are often geographically isolated from, or entirely deprived of, programs that give them postsecondary credit.[vi] Availing themselves of courses farther afield means contending with a dearth of transportation options[vii] and uncertain access to high-speed internet.[viii] College-readiness is another hurdle. Rural students are less likely to have college-educated parents to guide them through application and attendance.[ix] Their schools may also have fewer resources to help prepare them to apply. For example, a 2016 report found that access to even one counselor can increase four-year college enrollment by 10%,[x] but 14% of rural schools lacked a school counselor (compared to 6% of urban schools),[xi] Besides counselors, rural schools’ smaller budgets may mean more difficulties in recruiting and retaining high quality teachers who can assist their students in making the transition to college.[xii]

Rural students who are reluctant to move from their close-knit communities may have to choose between staying close to home or attending college.[xiii] Rural areas tend to be both physical and online educational deserts.” (Physical education deserts have no college or university, or only one public broad-access community college, within 25 miles. Online education deserts have no broadband access.)[xiv] Indeed, rural residents account for 82% of people who live in the United States’ education deserts.[xv] So, rural students who commit to retaining their rural residence may have to forego a college education.

Rural students can also be priced out of higher education. Higher education costs have grown considerably, such that students borrow, on average, over $35,000 for college[xvi] and over $100,000 for law school.[xvii] These costs may be daunting for rural students. Rural areas, on average, have higher rates of poverty than urban areas, [xviii] and first-time rural college students use financial aid at a higher rate than their urban peers.[xix]

  B.  A Roadmap to Effective Strategies for Recruiting Rural Criminal Lawyers

The road to law practice is long and expensive. Would-be lawyers must obtain a college degree, sit the Law School Admission Test (LSAT); gain admission to, then graduate from, law school; take a professional ethics exam; and pass the bar exam. Creating pipelines and financial incentives that bridge these phases is an indispensable step to increasing the number of rural lawyers. Happily, the medical profession has provided a blueprint for these measures. Medical practice, like law practice, requires many years of credentialing, from an undergraduate degree, to a standardized graduate school admissions test, to medical school, to licensure exams, residency, and fellowship. Rural medical candidates have a number of tools to help them navigate this path that their legal counterparts still lack. 

1.  Educational Pipelines

Successful education pipelines aimed at creating new rural professionals share several common characteristics. Programs with demonstrated success usually rely on strategies that:

• Engage in targeted outreach to rural students, exposing students to college opportunities, teaching them about professional career pathways, and providing them students with academic readiness courses and college campus tours.
• Help rural students navigate the complicated college applications process for both admissions and financial aid.
• Create college-to-graduate school partnerships with graduate schools in rural shortage professions such as healthcare or teaching.[i]
• Locate a “meaningful portion” of graduate students’ professional education in rural areas.[ii]
• Offer financial assistance with the costs of college and graduate school.

Many rural professional pipeline programs combine these strategies. Some of the most promising programs are in the medical space, rather than the legal space.

The University of Alabama’s healthcare and dentistry pipelines begin in junior year of high school, with summer coursework for students interested in healthcare and dentistry through the RHS (Rural Health Scholars) and RHDS (Rural Dental Health Scholars) programs. Students come to campus for the summer to take college-level Chemistry and Creative Writing courses. They receive free tuition, books, housing, access to campus facilities, and food. High School Seniors intending to attend college are eligible for the MOORE (Medical Opportunities and Outreach in Rural Education) program. Through MOORE, students again spend a summer at the University of Alabama, enjoying the same benefits available through RHS and RHDS. They take college courses and field trips related to rural medical practice, and receive training in how to succeed in pre-medical majors in college. The MOORE program aims to act as a funnel to the Rural Medical Scholars Program, a pipeline from college to medical school.

Other healthcare pipeline programs begin during a student’s college years, but continue through professional school. The University of Missouri’s Rural Medicine Pathway helps both college students and working professionals from rural backgrounds apply to medical school. Program participants receive regular admissions coaching and are exposed to rural clinical practice. Other incentives and supports include discounted MCAT preparation courses, reimbursement of medical school application fees, and evaluation for a medical school interview.

Some of the most successful programs offer dedicated rural practice tracks. For example, students in University of Illinois’ four-year doctoral pharmacy RPHARM Program have an extensive rural curriculum that includes “six interprofessional elective courses, three rural healthcare professional shadowing experiences, a community-based research project, and three advanced pharmacy practice experiences (APPEs) in a rural Illinois community.”[iii]   RPHARM students also shadow rural pharmacists, attend programs about rural health care issues, such as “Agricultural Hazards, Toxicology, & Farm Safety” and “Rural Ethics Scenarios.” An evaluation of RPHARM’s first decade concluded that between 33 and 57% of RPHARM graduates serve in rural locations.[iv]

At Pennsylvania’s Thomas Jefferson Medical School’s Physician Shortage Area Program (PSAP), there are reserved admissions slots for undergraduates from rural areas who intend to practice rural medicine. PSAP students receive mentoring and help with clinic placements. PSAP graduates are eight times as likely as their peers to become rural family doctors, and 79% of PSAP graduates remain in rural medical practice for 11-16 years.

College- and university-based programs for rural teachers appear likely to produce similar results. The Rural Student Success Initiative (RSSI), at Texas A&M University draws on its AgriLife Extension Service and network of county agents, community leaders, school districts, and national nonprofits. The program provides high school students with campus tours, part-time local college coaches, college fairs, and financial aid application assistance, all with a focus on Texas’ flagship universities, community colleges, and technical schools. RSSI also offers resources to students’ families, teachers, and guidance counselors. While more evaluation is underway, early RSSI results are promising: between 2019 to 2020, ten of the first cohort of 11 rural school districts saw applications to college and postsecondary training increase. In eight schools there was an increase of five percent or greater.

The University of Kansas’ Scholars in Rural Health program offers a college-to-graduate school blueprint that could easily be adapted to recruit rural law scholars. Interested upper class KU college students are assigned to a mentor, who they shadow for 100 hours over the summer. Participants attend regular program meetings and complete a capstone project. Program graduates who receive a satisfactory Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) score are automatically admitted to the University of Kansas Medical Center.

In medical school, the pipeline continues with programming by the KU Medical Center’s Office of Rural Medical Education. 

• All years: Students can join the Rural Medicine Interest Group, the largest student interest group at KU Medical Center. 
• First Year: Students can spend a week with a rural family doctor during a Rural Enrichment Week.
• Second Year: Students can complete clinical training and practice-based research in rural primary care through the Summer Training Option in Rural Medicine (STORM).
• Third Year: Students can elect a Rural Clerkship (up to six weeks) or Extended Rural Clerkship (up to 12 months) for their required third-year clerkship (clinical experience).
• Fourth Year: All students are required to complete a month-long Rural Preceptorship, during which they are hosted by one of 200 rural doctors who serve as volunteer faculty, or “preceptors.” Host sites are expected to provide housing. Students can then complete a two-week Rural Family Medicine Elective in a rural community.

Policymakers, educators, and practitioners are slowly realizing the importance of developing their legal pipelines. Scrappy startups have launched rural legal pipeline initiatives often in partnership with state supreme courts, state bar associations, and state legislators. These innovative new programs must be funded, studied, replicated, and scaled to meet the growing national need. They must also be expanded to include a strong focus on pipelines for prosecutors and indigent defense providers.

a. The Rural Challenge for Programs that Expose High School Students to Criminal Practice

Legal awareness programs for high school students abound, and most involve exposure to criminal legal practice. State bar associations,[i] and non-profits,[ii] as well as colleges, universities, and law schools,[iii] offer mock trial programs or ‘law academy’ programs that teach students about legal practice.’[iv]

Many of these programs offer students a robust exposure to criminal law. Mock trial programs often use criminal law fact patterns to educate students about the adversary process. Using simulated case materials, students study fact patterns, interview ‘witnesses’, and serve as prosecutors, defenders, judges, witnesses, and juries in mock criminal trials.[v] And while some high school legal academies also showcase civil practice models, many (such as Street Law programs) also explore criminal law.[vi]  Unfortunately, it can be challenging for moot court programs and legal academies to reach rural students.

State and national moot court competitions often require significant time commitments from volunteer attorneys.[vii] In rural legal deserts, lawyer scarcity may mean prevent schools from organizing student participation. Programs that are based on urban college and university campuses usually require on-campus participation.[viii] This may make attendance difficult, or even impossible, for rural students.[ix]

Even when statewide moot court programs are organized at the county level, they may not reach rural counties.[x] For example, California’s non-profit organization Teach Democracy offers a moot court program includes exposure to criminal law practice.[xi] In theory, the program operates statewide. In reality, it almost exclusively serves urban communities. Most of the state’s metro counties (31 of 37) participate in the moot court program.[xii] In stark contrast, only 4 of the state’s 30 non-metro counties participate.[xiii]

The same may be true for legal academy models. Teach Democracy’s Courtroom to Classroom (C2C) is intentionally designed to bring courtroom practitioners onto middle and high school campuses, rather than bring students to court.  Volunteer lawyers teach basic legal topics and offer on-site moot court programs in middle and high school classrooms. Since lawyers—not students—are responsible for travel, it might seem easier to reach rural schools. Yet, as of November 2024, the C2C program has only served suburban and urban schools.[xiv]

A small handful of high school pre-law programs directly target rural students. In deeply rural Mississippi, the Mississippi Access to Justice Commission and the Mississippi Bar Association have launched Themis Law Camp, a high-school-to-law-school summer camp pipeline.[xv] Students meet lawyers, learn about legal careers, and participate in activities like moot court.[xvi] By holding the camp in less urban areas of Mississippi (rather, for example, than exclusively in the state capital of Jackson), Themis facilitates participation from students in rural areas like Pontotoc County (pop. 31,184).[xvii]  

Unfortunately, the scale of these programs is radically insufficient to meet the need for attorneys in rural criminal legal deserts. States and law schools must coordinate their efforts to bring these opportunities to substantially more students. Moreover, high school students who are able to avail themselves of these pre-law programs too often lose momentum in the transition from college to law school and then to practice. Solutions must continue well beyond the high school stage.

b. The Need for an Increased Supply of College-to-Criminal-Practice Pipeline Programs

Pipeline programs must provide a complete pathway from high school or earlier to college, then on to law school and practice. At each moment of transition, new financial, personal, and logistical pressures can cause students to leave the rural criminal legal practice track. Comprehensive pipeline programs must acknowledge and tackle this reality by providing support and incentives for students to reach professional practice.

Existing law school pipelines must target rural students. For example, the Law School Admission Council (LSAC)[i] is a non-profit that administers the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT), and provides admissions resources for prelaw students and law schools.[ii] Its LSAC Prelaw Undergraduate Scholars (PLUS, Guided Journey) program is a free one-year program to prepare pre-law students for the LSAT and guide them through the admissions process. Participants receive ongoing application counseling, law school skills training, peer support, and financial assistance.  However, LSAC Plus, Guided Journey is broadly designed to support would-be law students who “face structural barriers or systemic challenges.” It does not attend to the unique needs and interests of rural students.

However, some law schools have adopted the medical pipeline mode, developing college-to-law-school pipeline partnerships. In Nebraska, the successful Rural Health Opportunities Program (RHOP) is a medical recruitment pipeline that has pointed the way for a similar rural law program. The pipeline starts in high school students by recruiting rural students to apply for admission to participating Nebraska state colleges RHOP program. Successful applicants receive a full college tuition scholarship. Satisfactory academic performance in the undergraduate RHOP curriculum guarantees students admission to the University of Nebraska Medical Center.[iii] According to a 2019 report, 45% of RHOP-trained doctors practice medicine in rural Nebraska.[iv]

Nebraska’s Rural Law Opportunity Program (RLOP) uses similar strategies. RLOP students receive scholarships to fund their undergraduate education at Chadron State College,[v] Wayne State College,[vi] or the University of Nebraska.[vii] Some students also receive assistance with student housing costs.[viii] Beginning in their first year of college, RLOP students forge connections with the University of Nebraska College of Law, visiting the campus for special events, lectures, and networking opportunities. Law School staff visit RLOP undergraduate campuses at least once per year and provide individual student consultations. The RLOP college education experience includes a pre-law component, and rural Nebraska legal internships are available to RLOP students during the summer after their junior year.[ix] RLOP students form “close-knit community and support system.”

RLOP graduates who maintain a 3.5 GPA and obtain a minimum LSAT score are guaranteed admission to the Nebraska College of Law. To increase the likelihood that they can meet these requirements, RLOP students receive free LSAT coaching. The Nebraska State Bar Association’s the Greater Nebraska Rural Opportunities Committee offers additional mentoring support.[x] RLOP launched in 2017 and, as of Spring 2025, counted 11 law school graduates, with around 70 enrolled undergraduate students and 22 law students.[xi] Seven of the 11 graduates were practicing in rural areas.[xii] And despite Nebraska’s dire need for public defenders,[xiii]  RLOP has no dedicated criminal law pathway.

A suite of ambitious and innovative rural recruitment strategies at Washburn University School of Law includes a unique Law School Early Admissions Program (LEAP) that allows students to count their first year of law school coursework toward their fourth year of college, reducing the path to law school graduation from seven years to six years. This “3+3” program saves students a year of undergraduate tuition and living expenses and accelerates their return to their rural homes communities. The program also covers the tuition of students’ first year of law school (potentially over $28,000), and provides at least $5,000 in scholarships for students second and third years of law school. Other program components include a donor-funded Rural Externship Program and Third Year Anywhere (TYA). Shawn Leisinger, Associate Dean of Centers and Externship Programs was an architect of these programs. In addition to coordinating these existing innovations, Dean Leisinger has devoted considerable time and energy to creating and expanding new Washburn programs that will serve rural students and rural communities.

c. The Necessity of Rural Criminal Law Programming, Coursework, and Rural Experiential Learning Opportunities

Admissions pipelines alone are insufficient. Law schools must develop pipelines that lead graduates to rural criminal law practice. Graduate-level healthcare schools have a well-developed focus on incentives and opportunities for post-graduation rural practice. Between 2008 and 2024, the number of residencies with a rural rotation increased from 120 programs to 412, and the number of programs dedicating 50% or more of their training time to rural areas increased more than twofold.[i] Nearly 65% of medical schools offered some sort of rural clinical experiences, 20% of medical schools had formal rural training programs, and nearly a quarter of all medical schools offered rural financial aid.[ii] Similar statistics apply to programs that educate other medical professionals. In May of 2023, nearly 40% of United States pharmacy programs offered rural pharmacy education opportunities.[iii] A recent study of Bachelor of Science in Nursing Programs found that 38% of programs specifically targeted rural Registered Nurses for recruitment.[iv]

Unfortunately, law schools have done comparatively little to encourage rural legal practice—and less still to encourage rural criminal practice. Among the nearly 200 accredited law schools in the United States, only a handful offer formal education in rural practice. Fewer still address the dire need for rural prosecutors and indigent defense providers. Formal rural practice pathways are scarce. Despite evidence that associates rural educational training with an increased likelihood of rural practice,[v] law schools rarely offer rural criminal internships, externships, or clinics.

i. Coursework

Few law schools offer courses about, or even touching on, rural practice. Notable exceptions include:

• The University of California, Davis Law’s Law & Rural Livelihoods seminar examines how rurality relates to legal areas like criminal justice, poverty, environment and land use.
• Nebraska Law’s Rural Development and Energy Law course focuses on how energy law shapes rural economies.
• Michigan Law’s Law in Rural America seminar (and “mini-seminar”[i]) explores topics like the structure of rural courts and governance, and the effects of urban bias on law and rural communities.
  • Michigan Law Professor Emily Prifogle shares a Rural Law Course Curriculum on her website.
• South Carolina Law’s Law and Urban/Rural Divide seminar (not currently offered) compared law and policy differences between urban and rural place, and how law has continued to shape rural America.
• Harvard Law’s Access to Justice and Legal Practice in Rural America reading group (not currently offered) examined how to address the legal needs of rural communities in areas like health, consumer, employment, and criminal law.
• Concord Law School at Purdue University Global, America’s first fully online law school, offers a virtual Rural Law Practice course focused on issues in rural legal deserts.  The online format is designed to save costs for people in remote areas by delivering lessons virtually.[ii] (Scholars recommend that law schools explore more flexible instruction options, like this one, to reach more rural residents.)[iii]

Still, only a handful of law schools offer these courses. More law schools must provide classroom instruction about the needs, successes and challenges of rural legal practice. Offerings should include courses addressing solo and small firm practice management, including maintaining licensure in multiple states; ethics and professional responsibility courses dealing with the appropriate use of remote technologies and the conflicts that can arise from a mixed practice and the dense networking of small communities; and criminal law, family law, real estate, probate and estate planning, local government, environmental and agricultural law courses that consider how doctrine plays out in rural spaces. Law schools should talk to their students about the problem of justice-by-geography, rebrand rural work as public interest work, and place their rural opportunities within their public interest offerings.[iv]

Again, law can look to medicine for other examples of rural curricular innovations. Dozens of graduate healthcare programs offer “rural training tracks.[v]

ii. Externships and Internships

Internships are non-credit bearing programs that place students in law practice environments where they work under a lawyer’s supervision. Externships are similar, but students earn academic credit for the practical learning experience. Because these are onsite learning experiences, internships and externships offer a rare opportunity for law students to spend a portion of their professional education in a rural legal practice setting. Generally, rural-immersive learning experiences are strongly associated with rural professional practice. In the legal education system, which does not require the lengthier and more in-depth residence programs common to graduate programs in healthcare and teaching, internships and externships are usually the only opportunity for a significant rural practice experience.

Nationally, there are hundreds of externship and internship programs.  “Generic” programs place law students in a wide range of legal settings that share only the most basic practice characteristics. For example, a “public interest externship” might place students in settings that practice civil rights, elder advocacy, education law, or small business assistance. The accompanying externship seminar is likely to explore those legal practice issues that are common to all participating externs.

Intern and externship placements offer not just work experience but often a pathway to post-graduate placements, and, equally importantly, a preview of the context that will color full time employment in any particular place. This last aspect is particularly crucial in rural areas, where individual relationships and rapport are indispensable.

Rural internships and externships remain somewhat rare. Several factors may account for this. One barrier to rural internships and externships arises from the relational nature of these temporary ‘apprenticeships.’ Broadly, law schools and practitioners must build trusting relationships to place students in appropriate settings. Again, externships demand more effort. Accredited law schools must maintain supervision over attorneys in charge of students[vi] so that students and placement sites benefit from the instructional and mentorship resources of experienced law faculty. If law schools lack strong connections to rural practice communities, they cannot give their students high quality immersive experiences in rural law practice.

Additionally, for suburban and urban law students, rural practice immersions are often expensive. Unless they are returning to their own rural hometowns, participating students must pay for temporary housing and transportation to remote placements sites. Students who do not own a car must shoulder additional financial burdens for longer-term car rental or forego the rural experience entirely.

Externships programs impose additional costs. As “experiential” components of the standard law school curriculum, externships require students to pay tuition for their externship experience as well as for the associated classroom component. Externships also increase the financial burden on law schools, which must fund faculty to supervise the program and teach the externship seminar.

These costs can be prohibitive. A short-lived Rural Criminal Law Externship at the Deason Criminal Justice Reform Center at SMU Dedman School of Law successfully placed students in rural prosecutor and public defender offices. Student cohorts were small, but outcomes were promising, with several students accepting permanent jobs in rural prosecution or public defense.[vii] However, the high costs of tuition, combined with the expenses of summer relocation, made the unsustainable.[viii]

Fortunately, some law schools have secured private or state funding for rural practice externships. The Dane G. Hansen Foundation funds Washburn’s six-credit summer Rural Externship Program. The Foundation covers the externship tuition costs. And provides students with a $5,000 stipend to offset housing, travel, and related expenses. The University of North Dakota Law School offers judicial externship opportunities that are funded by the State Bar Association of North Dakota.

While rural criminal externship programs remain exceedingly rare, there is a unique collaboration between Nevada’s Department of Indigent Defense Services (DIDS) and the William S. Boyd Law School at UNLV offers a promising model. Under the auspices of the Samuel S. Lionel Externship Program, DIDS offers a 10-week externship program in a rural public defense practice. When the DIDS externship launched, participating students received a stipend from the State Bar of Nevada. Since then, DIDS itself has assumed responsibility for the student stipends that support public defender externs in rural Nevada counties.[ix] Although almost every state is in dire need of rural prosecutors and public defenders, few externships address these critical specialties. The DIDS externship should be replicated nationwide and provide opportunities for prosecutors and defenders.

Non-credit bearing rural internships appear to be wider spread than rural externships.  Some are run by non-profit organizations. Others are coordinated by law schools and bar associations. Equal Justice Works (EJW), a nonprofit organization that promotes civil legal aid hosts the largest national program for public interest lawyer recruitment and placement.[x] Equal Justice Works’ Rural Summer Legal Corps, a partnership with the federal Legal Services Corporation (LSC), provides a stipend of $7,000 to law students who complete eight to ten weeks of summer work with a non-profit civil legal services provider. There is no similar national non-profit program that promotes summer experiences in rural criminal practice.

On the internship front, the University of Alabama’s Finch Fellowship Initiative places students with judges in rural areas for half a summer. Students engage in a variety of kinds of legal proceedings, participate in community-oriented projects, and develop their professional networks. They receive a $4,000 stipend and provide a concluding report on their experiences.

Similarly, the Idaho Heritage Project’s Rural Services Scholarship Fund University offers scholarships to students who participate in rural summer internships, with past recipients having taken up prosecutorial and public defense positions.

Several state courts and bar associations partnered with law schools have launched their own rural legal internship programs—many also provide students with stipends for transportation, room, and board. Indiana University’s Rural Justice Initiative at the Maurer School of Law places first-year law students in trial court judges’ chambers during the summer and provides them with a 1½-day training on civil, criminal, and access-to-justice issues, as well as a $4,000 stipend. The Texas Indigent Defense Commission has proposed legislative funding for rural public defense summer internships.[xi]

A comparison between these nascent rural legal immersions and the more well-established rural healthcare rotations and residencies demonstrates how far behind the legal community is. Law schools must work with bar associations, state prosecutors’ organizations, and indigent defense provider to increase the number and quality of rural criminal law internships and externships. They should solicit funds from private foundations and state and local governments to provide scholarship support for rural prosecution and defense externships that provide law students with immersive educational experiences in rural criminal practice.

iii. Clinics

Rural clinical programs can be another powerful practice immersion. Clinics are law practices run by law school faculty and staff. Under state ‘student practice’ rules, and under the close supervision of a licensed attorney, clinic students serve as lawyers, representing clients in a wide range of settings. In addition to providing an immersive rural training, a rural law clinic can teach students “soft skills” that are uniquely important to rural practice, such as cooperative work in “unstructured situations,” operation of a solo or small firm practice, and careful navigation of the overlapping personal and professional relationships they develop with rural colleagues and clients.[xii]

A rural law clinic almost always depends upon a rural law school location. So law school locations are often a limiting factor. Dozens of urban law schools would find it almost impossible to offer a rural law clinic. Other law schools may be rural adjacent or part of a micro-metro community and can therefore easily provide services to rural residents. And rural law schools, almost by definition, routinely offer rural law clinics. Prominent examples include:

The University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law offers a one-credit course on divorce law and the history of the Arkansas Delta. The course involves visiting courthouses; creating educational materials for pro se representation; and conducting outreach, education sessions, and intake for the subsequent Delta Divorce Clinic, in which students provide direct representation.

Some rural law clinics focus on criminal legal practice. Texas Tech University’s Caprock Regional Public Defender Office and Clinic, trains third-year law students to defend clients in rural West Texas counties near the more urban city of Lubbock. The program is a unique collaboration between the university, counties, and the state. Counties contribute small fees on a per-case basis, and the state-funded Texas Indigent Defense Commission covers most of the program’s operating expenses.[xiii]

And the University of Maine Law School now runs a unique off-campus Rural Practice Clinic in Fort Kent, Maine.  (Fort Kent sits at the northern border with Canada, a five hour drive from the Law School’s Portland campus).[xiv]  Students live in the Fort Kent community and work for local low-income clients.[xv] This legislatively enacted program is funded with seed money from the Maine Attorney General. As an added bonus, the clinic trains students to handle a wide range of cases, including criminal defense, thereby mimicking the experience of a rural general practitioner.[xvi]

Western New England School of Law has succeeded in funneling students to take court-appointed criminal cases in rural areas of shortage through its Criminal Law Defense Practicum. Students in the clinic work with either public defender offices or appointed counsel in two rural counties in Western Massachusetts, handling both misdemeanor and felony cases and gaining exposure to bail hearings, motion sessions, and trials. The school also hosts a corresponding Criminal Law Prosecution Practicum, in which students are placed in the prosecutor’s office in one of the two counties in which the Defense Practicum operates to handle misdemeanors and felonies at all phases from initial appearance through trial.

iv. Rural Pro Bono

Pro bono and volunteering opportunities can form a meaningful complement to curricular offerings. The University of South Carolina operates the Palmetto LEADER, a mobile law office where law students assist pro bono attorneys providing free legal services to rural and underserved communities. The mobile bus visits locations based on factors like poverty data and access to legal services. Similarly, alternative spring breaks can offer students a brief but fully immersive look into rural work. Many such programs offer rural opportunities, and some offer rural criminal experiences. For example, for over a decade, Denver University Sturm College of Law Alternative Spring Break students have taken up weeklong placements in rural areas serving in prosecutor’s and public defender offices, among others. Similar programming exists through UC Irvine’s Alternative Spring Break, which, for the first time in Spring 2026, took students with previous criminal law experience to rural Maine to practice under the Aroostook County public defender. Students got practice on their feet in misdemeanor court and contributed to research for felony cases.

v. Career Services Counseling 

Law school career services offices (LCSOs) must work with networks of rural employers and rural alumni. LCSOs can promote rural practice by inviting rural employees and practitioners to campus, hosting rural practice events, and promoting the benefits of a rural criminal law career.[xvii] As they engage with rural alumni and rural employers, LCSOs learn what employers need from new rural practitioners. Sharing that information with law faculty can help schools develop curricula that redress rural legal knowledge and skills gaps, better preparing students for rural practice and serve those communities’ needs.[xviii]

LCSOs must work towards a cultural shift in this area. They should stress the leadership opportunities that rural work presents. Rural practice should be positioned as prestigious and noble, a form of public interest work for highly motivated students. To this end, state judges working in, or covering, rural areas, including state supreme court justices, should consider reserving clerkships for students with rural experience or a commitment to enter rural practice.

Building rural practice communities for law school students can also help build graduating cohorts who support each other in their journey to rural practice. The Finch Society, for example, is a law-student-run organization that promotes small town practice and access to justice, with chapters at the University of Arkansas and University of Maine.

At the University of Mississippi Law School, the student-run Magnolia Defenders have taken matters into their own hands. While Magnolia Defenders seeks to create a robust community of future public defenders.” Their goals include “self-education on the role of public defense,” “advocacy and direct action related to current issues affecting the public defense legal profession and the criminal justice system,” and “communicat[ion] and connect[ion] with alumni” to develop Mississippi public defense networks. Magnolia Defenders have participated in local and national rural public defense programming.[xix]

State and national bar associations must help law school career counselors develop rural practice pathways and recruitment networks.  The Federal Office of Rural Health Policy helps to support the National Rural Recruitment and Retention Network (3RNET). Member organizations include healthcare graduate schools, state offices of rural health, rural practitioners, and non-profit rural health organizations.[xx] 3RNET has an impressive national reach.  There is a 3RNET Coordinator in each state, as well as in the Cherokee Nation and the Northern Mariana Islands. Other federal agencies, such as the Indian Health Service and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs also participate.[xxi] The 3RNET website provides a rural healthcare employment exchange for rural job seekers and employers. Critically, 3RNET trains graduate schools in how to help students find rural employment and teaches employers how to recruit rural professionals. It also offers employers a six-part online training program in how to “recruit for retention.”[xxii] In 2022-2023, 3RNET’s rural employment exchange website reported 3,736 rural placements.[xxiii]

The legal community would benefit from similar efforts. While many scholars have written about strategies to drive rural recruitment, but those publications are not easily accessible to practitioners, nor do they offer the straightforward “how to” format that would help law schools and rural employers build direct collaborations.[xxiv]

2.  Post-Graduate Pipelines—Fellowships, Incubators, and Other Strategies that Support and Encourage Rural Criminal Law Practice

a. Fellowships

In the medical field, rural fellowships serve as critical training grounds, helping residents gain the particularized skills they need to serve rural communities.[i] Post-graduate training, whether residency or fellowships plays an important role in recruitment,[ii] with over 55% of recent residents practicing permanently in the states in which they completed residency.[iii]

For attorneys interested in full-time public service, fellowships can help launch or transition their careers. Typically law schools,[iv] professional associations,[v] nonprofits, foundations, and government agencies sponsor fellows who do public service work for a designated period at a host organization. These fellowships become a pathway to permanent placement.

Equal Justice Works (EJW) sponsors around 100 civil legal aid fellows per year. The EJW fellowships are powerful incentives for new lawyers to experiment with public service practice. Fellows can earn more than $60,000 each year for two years, as well as health insurance, fringe benefits, and $5,000 in loan repayment assistance. EJW fellowship programming also includes an annual leadership training and networking event. Importantly, EJW reports that 85% of its fellows remain in public service positions after their fellowships.

Unfortunately, there are no similarly well-established national fellowship programs for criminal lawyers or rural lawyers, much less for rural prosecutors and public defenders. Local, state, and non-profit organizations have built their own programs.

The Illinois State Bar Association’s Rural Practice Associate Fellows program places graduating law students and attorneys with rural firms in associate positions. The program pays a $5,000 stipend at the beginning of employment, and encourages permanent placement by offering an additional $5,000 stipend if the associate is still employed at the firm at the one year mark. The program also incentivizes employers with CLE credit for participation. New Mexico Judiciary’s Rural Justice Initiative Clerkship Program funds four law clerk positions under the mentorship of state judicial district Chief Judges in rural areas. Law clerks make a two-year commitment and receive a salary of $78,000, plus all judicial branch benefits.

There are emerging movements to create rural criminal law fellowships. For example, Kansas State Board of Indigents’ Defense Services’ Rural Justice Fellowship places a new attorney in a regional public defender office to do felony criminal defense representation and implement a two-year special project to improve the agency’s rural practice. Colorado’s Rural District Attorney Fellowship Program places a new attorney at a rural district attorney’s office and pays their salary for one year. This is state-funded and a collaboration between the Colorado District Attorney’s Council (a statutorily created organization representing Colorado’s elected District Attorneys), the University of Colorado and University of Denver.[vi] The Greater Colorado Fellowship Program places graduates with the Colorado Alternate Defender and pays salary and benefits for up to two years. Fellows learn criminal defense and entrepreneurial skills to set them up to start their own defense practice. In 2025, the Texas Indigent Defense Commission offered one-time grants for rural programs that could be used for indigent defense fellowships.

But these remain isolated programs. Only concerted scaling will meet the need. Larger fellowship programs would offer the advantage of allowing fellows to operate as part of a cohort, sharing knowledge and camaraderie that might be lacking in small-scale arrangements.

b. Incubators

For private attorneys, legal incubators can help launch their practices and expand access to legal services in underserved areas.[vii] Incubators provide resources like start-up funding, mentoring, peer support, and training on substantive law and business operations.[viii] The American Bar Association lists 75 incubators created since 2007.[ix] Although most programs are not criminal-law-focused, they can help bring attorneys to areas that rely on the private bar to handle court-appointed defense. Scholars note that incubators are useful in rural legal deserts because they “further the goal of increasing the number of graduates trained to open solo or small practices by helping graduates solidify subject matter expertise and practice skills.”[x]

To help green Arkansas’ rural legal deserts,[xi] the University of Arkansas’ William H. Bowen School of Law’s Rural Practice Incubator Program, in operation since 2018, provides training, resources, mentoring, and guidance to help launch their practices. Attorneys are expected to provide at least 100 hours of pro bono or low bono legal services during the 18-month program. Similarly, the Montana Legal Services Association’s Rural Incubator Project for Lawyers is a 12-month program that provides business development assistance; legal training; practice resources and office space; up to $1,800 in loan repayment assistance; and more to lawyers who form solo or small businesses in rural areas and provide 25 pro bono hours and 150 reduced rate service hours. Another example is the Vermont Lawyer Incubator Program, a partnership initiative of the Vermont Bar Association and Vermont Law & Graduate School that helps lawyers new to practice or to the state establish their practices through resources like case rounds with experienced lawyers and perks like stipends for office costs and free bar association membership. The incubator requires that lawyers take a certain number of low-bono cases and base themselves in rural or underserved areas.

Colorado’s Office of the Alternate Defense Counsel’s (OADC) Greater Colorado Fellowship Program is a hybrid fellowship/incubator program. OADC is a state agency that oversees contract defense attorneys for criminal cases. To help private attorneys launch their small-town practice (so that they can eventually contract with OADC), for two years, OADC pays them a full-time salary (around $66-97,000) and benefits, provides training and mentoring from experienced defense attorneys, and connects them with groups like Office of Respondent Parent Counsel, Office of the Child’s Representative, and Colorado Legal Services so that they can start a well-rounded public service practice.

Successful incubators offer dual advantages to rural places; they cultivate lawyers while also building the small-business knowledge base. Alumni of incubators are equipped to become mentors to would-be lawyers and entrepreneurs in the community.

C. Concluding Observations

1. 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.[i] 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.[ii] 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.[iii] And there is no programmatic focus on rural criminal practice. Meanwhile, Nebraska is in desperate need of public defenders and county attorneys.[iv] As of June of 2024, “[s]ome public defender/county attorney jobs [had] been vacant for six months in rural counties without a single applicant.”[v] And in rural Hall County, Nebraska, the public defender has been trying for more than two years to hire a juvenile public defender.[vi]

2. 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.[vii]

   

• 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 $28,000[viii]), 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.

3. 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.[x] FY2024, the RPED allocated over $44.8 million across 22 pipeline programs in 18 states.[xi]  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.[xii] Rural communities urgently need private and public funding to fill this void.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• 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.[i]
  • Rural immersion educational components.[ii]
  • 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.

a. 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.  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.  The Office’s Rural Medical Education Network has six regional directors, who are practitioners who help coordinate student placements in their regions.  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. 

b. 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.[i] 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.[ii] 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.

c. 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.

d. 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.  

e. 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.[i] 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.