Fellowships
In the medical field, rural fellowships serve as critical training grounds, helping residents gain the particularized skills they need to serve rural communities.95 Post-graduate training, whether residency or fellowships plays an important role in recruitment,96 with over 55% of recent residents practicing permanently in the states in which they completed residency.97
For attorneys interested in full-time public service, fellowships can help launch or transition their careers. Typically law schools,98 professional associations,99 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.100 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.101 Incubators provide resources like start-up funding, mentoring, peer support, and training on substantive law and business operations.102 The American Bar Association lists 75 incubators created since 2007.103 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,105 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.
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.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
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.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.
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.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.