Kansas Supreme Court justice takes on the state's rural attorney shortage

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Kansas Reflector Podcast 21 min 1 speaker 8 chapters transcribed 2 days ago

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What is the severity of the rural attorney shortage in Kansas?

Anna Kaminsky 0:02

Kansas has a legal crisis. At the heart of it is a shortage of attorneys in rural areas of the state. This plays out in the justice system as families struggle to hire counsel or attorneys become overwhelmed with caseloads. Communities fight to compete with urban counties to secure a pool of accessible and quality legal professionals, but the numbers are often stacked against them. the Judicial Branch's Rural Justice Initiative Committee called the shortage severe and widespread. The leader of that committee and a sitting member of the Kansas Supreme Court since 2020 is with us today to dive into this important issue. Justice K.J. Wall, welcome.

K.J. Wall 0:50

Thank you very much for having me.

Anna Kaminsky 0:52

To start, can you frame the problem for us? What does severe and widespread look like?

K.J. Wall 0:59

Well, it essentially means at the bottom line that there aren't enough attorneys in many parts of our state to serve the needs of their community, both whether it be criminal defense all the way to business ventures. It runs the entire gamut.

Anna Kaminsky 1:22

And almost half of Kansans live in rural areas, but only about 20% of attorneys working in the state practice there. And in 99% of the state's rural counties, the attorney to resident ratio is below the national average. And to help visualize this, I thought this was such an interesting fact, but there are more attorneys who are licensed in Kansas working in Kansas City, Missouri than in all of rural Kansas. How and why did we get to this point?

K.J. Wall 1:52

There are a number of reasons that our committee detailed in its final report in 2024, but as to our profession specifically, our data shows that there are economic variables primarily related to the debt loads that law students are graduating with right now. There are also professional concerns about whether they'll have adequate mentorship if they locate their practice to a rural community.

How many attorneys practice in rural Kansas compared to urban counties?

K.J. Wall 2:26

And there are larger macroeconomic issues that if they want to start a family there, is there going to be adequate housing? Are there going to be... health care facilities and some of those larger issues that are maybe beyond our scope, but certainly play a role.

Anna Kaminsky 2:48

And what are the consequences of this? I'm really interested in the constitutional implications here, especially for folks, for criminal defendants who can't afford an attorney and need one appointed to them.

K.J. Wall 3:01

Right, that's an incredible concern and really one of the reasons that the former Chief Justice Marla Lukert created our committee. Anecdotally, we heard from our chief judges across the state that they were having You know, difficulty appointing attorneys to represent individuals in criminal defense or other matters where the right to counsel is guaranteed by the Constitution or by state statute. So certainly there is that constitutional dynamic there. You know, the right to counsel exists in felony criminal cases and other cases where maybe a person's family and their children are at stake in child in need of care proceedings. But generally, we've seen in our rural counties that there are a shortage of attorneys that just aren't available to staff the needs in those cases.

K.J. Wall 4:02

Beyond that, you know, the attorneys generally in our rural communities are economic drivers. They facilitate commercial transactions. They employ community members or assist businesses that do. And oftentimes they reinvest their earnings in other ventures in the community. So they really are an economic driver. Final impact is really on the community itself because rural attorneys most often serve on other boards of leading institutions, hospital boards, boards of education. You'll see the local attorneys that are really taking leadership roles in those organizations too and helping to form the fabric of their communities. And as we lose those, it really does impact the entire community.

Why was the Rural Justice Initiative Committee created?

Anna Kaminsky 4:53

Have judges seen a growing number of people representing themselves in court?

K.J. Wall 5:00

Yes, without question. We're still trying to study the data and quantify that number, but you would be hard-pressed to find any judge across the state that has seen anything other than an increase in self-represented litigants in our system.