In many parts of Ohio, legal help is hard to come by.
Seventy-eight out of Ohio’s 88 counties do not have enough attorneys to meet their residents' needs, according to the Ohio State Bar Association. In northwest Ohio, the situation could get even more severe as many practicing attorneys near retirement.
A coalition of legal organizations and law schools in the area are working to ensure justice is still accessible.
The Ohio State Bar Association, Ohio State Bar Foundation, Ohio Northern University and the University of Toledo have partnered to launch the “Lawyers = Justice” initiative, which aims to build a pipeline of attorneys in rural Ohio.
“It opens the eyes of newly graduated law students to the possibilities of life in a rural community or in a small town,” Wood County Common Pleas Judge Matt Reger said.
The shortage
Reger said the lack of practicing attorneys in small towns often comes down to money.
“First, you start out with maybe a perception that the rural practice is not going to give me the lucrative or the well-paying job that I'm really hoping for,” he said. “I go to law school, I incur a lot of debt. How can going to a small town or a rural area pay off that debt?”
Instead, student loan-concerned graduates often leave law schools in the region to set up offices in Columbus or Cleveland.
Reger said he sees the impact firsthand: Over half the people seeking a marriage dissolution in his courtroom represent themselves.
“It's advice, it’s access to the courts, it’s a whole plethora of things that attorneys bring that is absent in the rural areas,” Reger said.
The solution
The Ohio State Bar Association and its partners’ solution is to sponsor attorneys’ start in the region. The initiative will give four newly licensed lawyers seed money to build their own practice.
They’ll be provided a stipend and their own office. In return, the fellows are expected to take on some pro-bono work and work toward expansion.
“It's almost like an incubator,” Reger said. “At the end of that time period, they will go out and establish their own practice within the community and build upon it.”
In addition, the initiative will also train around 40 law students each year on how to serve rural residents and grow the number of free legal clinics in the area.
Ohio Northern University and the University of Toledo will add additional clinics in Lima and Bowling Green to serve low-income Ohioans.
The impact
Reger said the availability of attorneys and legal clinics is important – not just for people who want to file a lawsuit or defend themselves against criminal charges.
He said attorneys are vital to community health.
“We find that in a community that has access to legal representation, the stock of rental properties goes up and improves in its quality, because they know these people have access to lawyers,” he said.
He views justice as knowing what recourse exists when a landlord won’t fix the air conditioning unit or what options are available for family estate planning. Attorneys open up resources that are unreachable to the civilian, he said.
“The legislature makes the laws, the governor signs into law and enforces it, but the fact of the matter is, access to those laws sometimes can only come through legal representation.”
