Small Town Attorneys Hydrate‘ Legal Deserts’
Pictured above: Vic Harper and his daughter, Alex, of Harper Law Office in Star City are dedicated to providing residents of Lincoln County and rural south Arkansas with legal options.
Star City sits broad and flat, a rivet in the hard, fertile Arkansas Delta. Besieged on all sides by galloping acres of cropland, the Lincoln County seat goes about life one gear slower than most places. If any of the 2,500 souls who live here know you, chances are they knew your daddy and his daddy before him. It’s the kind of town where life revolves around cheering the Bulldogs and news of the world shared over home-cooked daily specials at the local cafe.
Harper Law Office mirrors its homespun surroundings, a fixture in the community ever since Vic Harper hung his shingle 40 years ago. Specializing in family law, real estate law, wills, trusts, estates and some miscellaneous legal services, the office is a well-recognized service provider to the area. Truth be told, it’s a quiet little firm in a quiet little town, which is just how Vic likes it.
“There’s a lot of people that you actually get to help, and you get to see it happen,” Vic said in a soft molasses drawl. “You do adoptions, get kids out of bad situations, you help people with their elderly parents, and you get to see the results. Also, you make friends with these folks. You make friends with law enforcement and things like that.
“I think one of the big advantages is in these smaller towns you can get things done faster. If I need something, I know who the surveyor is, I know who, the insurance agent is. I can call them and get it done.”
Alex Harper said she had other options but was always drawn back home.
Over the past decade Vic, 65, has been joined in the firm by his daughter Alex, who like her father, left Star City just long enough to complete her degrees and figure out life in a big firm in the big city wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
“I considered other options as I was going through law school, and I was always led back here,” she said. “I would look at other types of law, and I just didn’t gravitate to those. It just wasn’t my niche. It would come back over and over through skills courses that I was meant for the blessing and the curse that is family law.
“I’m also very close to my family; my older sibling is here, and my nephews were a very, very big pull to coming back. And I wanted to have children, and I would much prefer them to go to school here versus Little Rock or Sherwood, where I was living at one time.”
If such commingling of generational fortunes as Vic and Alex’s doesn’t seem particularly noteworthy, it isn’t — at least not in a hundred other towns and a thousand other family practices. In fact, it’s not particularly unusual in these parts either, where kids still grow up to do what their parents did, albeit in fewer numbers than they used to.
But mix the specific elements of place and profession, and Star City is something truly remarkable in the state — a rural community that’s managed to attract and retain resident legal firms comprised of multiple generations, the Harpers being exhibit A. That might not sound like something a community would hang its hat on, but it’s what the state’s bar association and law colleges are desperate to replicate and something other rural counties in Arkansas would kill for.
“We have a legal desert in many areas of our state, and it’s a significant problem,” said Margaret Dobson, president of the Arkansas Bar Association, who has her own small-town practice in Sheridan. “This topic is really near and dear to my heart and something I’ve been preaching about for a number of years. If you don’t have a lawyer in the community, people can’t stop in and ask their questions. By the time it’s important enough for them to go to the big city to ask a lawyer, it’s not a little problem anymore. Now it’s a big problem, and it ends up feeling like the legal system hasn’t been fair to them.
“It’s part of the continuing divide in our country between the haves and the have-nots. As lawyers, we’re the voice for the person who needs a voice in a courtroom, and in many places, people don’t have access to justice because they don’t have access to an expert who can help figure out an answer.”
There is no clearer symptom of the slow death of small communities, save perhaps for lack of medical professionals, than the bone-deep shortage of attorneys in rural Arkansas. In its 2020 Profile of the Legal Profession, the American Bar Association spotlighted the problem of legal deserts and found the Natural State to be in good company. The report noted that, of the more than 3,100 counties and county equivalents in the United States, about 1,300 (40 percent) had less than one lawyer per 1,000 residents, and 182 had only one or two resident attorneys. Most sobering of all, 52 U.S. counties had no resident attorneys located within their borders.
Arkansas had 6,299 lawyers per the 2020 report, which worked out to 2.1 lawyers per 1,000 people. This tied it for last in the nation with Arizona and South Carolina, states with roughly twice to two-and-a-half times the population base. Arkansas also had the dubious distinction of having one of the 52 counties, Cleveland County, with zero resident lawyers. Seven counties registered less than five attorneys, including Calhoun (two), Lafayette (two), Montgomery (three), Fulton (four), Newton (four), Scott (four) and Pike (four), while 12 more had between six and nine lawyers.
Vic Harper said the current shortage of attorneys in rural communities is more pronounced than ever.
In the 2022 version of the report, Arkansas improved slightly and tied for 45th in the nation at 2.3 lawyers per 1,000 residents with Indiana, Iowa, Mississippi and South Dakota. South Carolina, North Dakota, Idaho and Arizona rounded out the bottom four states with South Carolina, again last at 2.1 attorneys per 1,000 residents.
At face value, the cause of the drought shares a familiar refrain with many other professions — baby boomers are hanging it up, and not enough Gen X’s and younger are there to step into their place. Why the younger set isn’t stepping in is a more nuanced question. After all, bringing an in-demand skillset into an underserved area with virtually no competition and low overhead is usually seen as a golden opportunity. Not so in the current legal profession.
“If I knew the exact problem, I would wave a magic wand and fix it. I don’t know that it’s one thing for every person as much as it is a host of things for a number of people,” Dobson said. “A lot of them want to stay in more metropolitan areas. They want social opportunities and marriage opportunities. I also think in terms of opening your own practice, it’s a little scary.
“Law school does an amazing job of teaching how to spot issues and how to think and how to analyze and how to research, but you physically cannot pack into three years how to actually practice law. Opening your own office, you are your own human resource manager, your own accountant, your own everything. If you go to work at a firm, there’s a safety net. You have all those experts around you to help you with those things. It’s a softer landing.”
Vic said while the current shortage is more pronounced than it used to be, rural communities have always been challenged when it comes to attracting legal firms. Even among those lawyers who do come out of law school intending to go back home, turnover can be high given the hustle required to pay the bills. Harper Law Office casts a wide net to keep the lights on, serving essentially all of southeast Arkansas across 12 counties, plus selected cases in central and even north-central Arkansas that make sense. It’s a highly relational business where familiarity with local dynamics and a sound professional reputation with judges are key factors to long-term success.
“I think when Alex started, I had four friends that either had kids or close relatives that went into the practice with them but Alex is the only one left,” Vic said. “There was a group of five that started about the same time she did in South Arkansas and she’s the last one. They’ve all moved on; most of them don’t even practice law anymore.”
“A ton of people I graduated law school with started practicing and quickly said, ‘Oh no. This [expletive] is terrible,’” Alex said. “They started doing finance or literally anything else other than this.”
Research from the University of California Davis School of Law released in 2015 sought to discover how Arkansas law students felt about legal careers in rural areas and why. It surveyed students at the state’s two law schools — the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law — and found the leading discouraging factors were a perceived lack of earning power in a rural practice and a general shortage of career and professional opportunities, attitudes Alex has witnessed among her own peers.
“I think there’s a misconception because the population is smaller that there’s not going to be a heavy enough caseload,” she said. “I have an acquaintance in Memphis about to finish up. She’s close to taking the bar, and her husband is somewhat local to here, and they’re tossing around the idea of coming back. She will, I think, be a brilliant attorney. She’s working for fairly large firms there in northeast Arkansas. She talked to me about her fears in coming here because she is not from here. Is there going to be a high enough case load? Am I needed there? Will I be able to support a family if I am there?”
Students in the UC Davis study echoed these sentiments, concerns that appeared to stem largely from perceptions based on life experiences that provided limited, if any, exposure to rural areas. With said exposure, the report found, perceptions changed dramatically. Only about 5.5 percent of students in the study had grown up in a county with less than 15,000 residents, but an average of about 15.5 percent of them reported having spent a year in such a county at some point. Of those who’d spent a year in rural areas, 75 percent of Fayetteville law students and 85 percent of Little Rock law school students would seriously consider working in a county of less than 15,000 people.
Kelly Terry, associate dean for experiential learning and clinical programs with the Bowen School of Law, said the law school provides real-world opportunities for students to impart just this type of professional exposure outside the state’s metro areas.
“Experiential learning is basically where we put students in roles as attorneys to really focus on the day-to-day work that attorneys perform,” she said. “In our upper-level experiential learning, students can participate in a clinic or an externship. Our Delta Divorce Clinic is probably the one where we have the most impact.
“That clinic focuses on what you might consider the more traditional counties of the Delta, like Woodruff and Lee counties in the eastern part of the state. Students in that clinic go to that part of the state on a regular basis — they’re meeting people there; they’re seeing the cities and towns. That clinic has also done some work in Jefferson County and Lincoln County, and now they’ve broadened their reach, and they’re focusing on northeast Arkansas outside of Jonesboro, giving students exposure to those other parts of the state.”
Suzanne Penn is the director of the Delta Divorce Clinic. She said the impact of the program lies not only in the services it provides but in giving students an eye-opening look at the level of need that exists within these areas. The hope is at least a few will be moved enough by the pressing cause of providing equal justice for all to set up shop in an underserved area.
“There is clearly a need, and the reason for that need is not just because of no private attorneys in rural counties. It’s also because existing legal services just don’t have the capacity to serve every low-income Arkansan in this state,” she said. “These are people who have fallen through the cracks in our civil justice system because local attorneys simply can’t take on that many pro bono cases if they’re trying to make ends meet to make their practice work.
“Among the people I have met was a gentleman down in southeast Arkansas who had been separated from his spouse for 40 years and had not been able to obtain a divorce until our clinic came down to Chicot County to help him. There are easily five to 10 people I’ve met who’ve been separated 30 years in the eight years we’ve been doing this, and a very good number have been separated 20 years.”
One important finding of the UC Davis study was the impact that incentives could have on the situation. Loan repayment assistance was one potential motivator named by a majority of respondents, who said they would seriously consider a rural practice in exchange for loan repayment of between $5,000 and $10,000 per year. While such incentive programs are already in place in many states for medical professionals, including in Arkansas, such programs for new lawyers are virtually nonexistent nationwide.
It’s not just financial incentives that could potentially move the needle, either. The UC Davis study also showed mentorship could be an equally powerful draw. About 64 percent of students surveyed said they would be interested to very interested in taking over a retiring lawyer’s practice if the retiree would agree to provide mentoring for a certain period of time. The Bowen School of Law has built on this desire among law students, creating a legal practice incubator for students with any interest at all in practicing rurally to help get their venture off the ground.
“The committee reviews their application, their business plan, their goals. Then we select ones that we think have a good plan,” Dobson said. “We help them define their plan a little better, and then we provide them a lot of support in their first year or two out in the practice. We try to pull resources together from as many different areas as possible, providing them with mentors they can talk to, providing them with services and supplies and education and programs and software. We also provide a little bit of money to help pay rent or to help with that initial setup cost.”
Alex knows firsthand the fears of the new attorney in practice, which is why she said she’s grateful for having joined the firm with her dad to help the breaking-in process go more smoothly.
“I think it was a huge factor in me ending up here because I could not have had a better teacher,” she said. “At the beginning, you’re not experienced. To be honest, if I’m going to get a lawyer, I’m going to get the lawyer that’s been practicing for 30 years, not two. So, they would come in for [Vic], and I would sort of ride his coattails, which you may not get to do at a larger firm. That’s how I learned. Then I started developing those relationships.
“I think it was weirder 10 years ago than now, but it still is weird for me to have a 70-year-old client. I struggle not to say ‘yes ma’am, no ma’am’ and to be in that authoritative role. I want an attorney who’s strong and is able to direct me as the client, and I try to be that.”
Vic noted that small-town law often moves at its own pace and speaks its own language. He’s judiciously turned down some local cases in his career, knowing how easily small-town feuds can start and how long they can simmer. These and other unique elements of client relationships and court etiquette are lessons he’s tried to pass on to his daughter.
“I’ve always told Alex, ‘Don’t have harsh words with other attorneys. Some of them you’re going to see twice, but some of them you’re going to see a hundred times, so don’t burn bridges unless you have to,’” he said.
“Sometimes when we have attorneys from out of town, their dialogue will start off very aggressive,” Alex said. “I would say nine times out of 10, by the time we’re in court we’re good because they realize we can do just as good of a job without being an ass. Now, sometimes I’m going to give you the energy you give me, but in general, I think we’re just nicer down here.”
This aside, there’s no denying what time has brought to the practice of law and the many ways the new generation thinks and does things differently, both attorney and client alike. That’s where Vic has seen Alex step into her own.
“We have a lot of people, more what I call the younger crowd, that call and ask for Alex now, no doubt,” he said. “She can relate really well to them.”
“I think we have, over the years, developed a relationship where we know our strengths,” Alex said. “His strengths are those real estate things, not the talking to people every day and let-me-be-your-therapist things. Then there are certain types of cases I don’t touch; I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t pretend to. Those are the things that he’s wonderful at.
“Do we disagree? Absolutely. But with our dynamic, I always knew that it was a safe space for disagreement. Sometimes I will die on that rock, and this just happened the other day, — I had to come back in and go, ‘Yep, you were right.’ This is his ship, but I know if I disagree with him when I think we should do something, I know I can say, ‘Hey, we need to do this; here’s why,’ and if it makes a lick of sense, he’s going to listen to that.”
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