(Radio Iowa) – Researchers at Iowa State University have classified 18 of Iowa’s 99 counties as “legal deserts” because there are not enough attorneys in the area to represent private clients. I-S-U rural sociologist David Peters led the research, which found Lee County in southeast Iowa has a critical lack of attorneys.

“What we found is that a lot of the state’s micropolitan areas — and these are counties that have a city of around 10,000 to maybe 30,000 people — also came up as legal deserts,” Peters says. “We found that Clinton, Iowa, is a legal desert, Fort Dodge is a legal desert as well as Oskaloosa.” Fourteen other counties, many with small populations, were rated as urgent or emerging legal deserts.

The study evaluated data from most every state — Hawaii and Alaska were not included. It found 11 percent of rural counties in the 48 contiguous states are legal deserts. “Our country produces a lot of lawyers, but the majority of them want to live in urban areas,” Peters says. “To get a law degree is very expensive. You incur a very large amount of student debt to accomplish that and a lot of people go into private practice in larger cities where the money is, so that’s one issue.” Peters says while there are a lot of lawyers in the U-S, many aren’t taking private clients.

Map of legal deserts in the U.S. (Map courtesy of Iowa State University)

“They’re really working the government or they’re working for a corporation,” Peters says, “so that also kind of peels off a number of lawyers into non-private practice.” Two Iowa State University students who intend to become lawyers worked with Peters on the study.”Even though at the undergraduate level I have a lot of young college students here at Iowa State that want to go practice law back home, they’re understanding the barriers,” Peters says, “and so that’s part of the reason why we started this project.”

Peters coordinates Iowa’s State’s “Small Town Project” and his research has focused on population decline in rural areas and discovered a surprising lack of access to attorneys in private practice. “I heard in a number of communities, for example, that not having enough criminal defense attorneys or not having enough public defenders put a lot of rural people at risk for longer sentences and even wrongful convictions,” Peters said. “We also heard that not having enough family law attorneys in these small towns really complicated divorce proceedings or child custody or support.”

The study was published in the spring edition of the South Dakota Law Review. Half of the paper reviewed policies to address legal deserts and it found a few states issued licenses for legal paraprofessionals who can handle most legal matters without being supervised by an attorney.  “Just like a physician assistant or P.A. can do a lot of your medical work that doesn’t really need an M.D.,” Peters says.

Peters says the cost of studying to become a licensed legal paraprofessional is far less than law school and he suggests rural communities could recruit local people who’d be more likely to stay once they get the certification.