Innovative program brings attorneys to rural South Dakota - Entrepreneur Generations

After five years, an innovative program to attract attorneys to rural South Dakota is not only thriving, it's growing. More than 60 percent of attorneys in the state live and work in four cities: Sioux Falls, Rapid City, Aberdeen, and Pierre. So rural residents often have to travel great distances to access legal representation. Project Rural Practice was launched in 2013 by the Unified Judicial System and the South Dakota Bar Association to address the disparity. The state legislature, state Bar, and UJS pay 35 percent of incentive payments to help retain the attorneys to rural areas. In return for agreeing to work in a rural area, each attorney receives about $60,000 in these incentive payments over the course of five years. After the fifth year, the attorney can choose to stay in the community or move elsewhere. The programs creators hope that, by the fifth year, the attorneys will choose to stay because they've put down roots in their new community.

By all accounts, the program is doing well. Two years ago the state government expanded it to include an internship program and to allow 48 counties to qualify for the program. "The pilot 16 attorneys of Project Rural Practice have only seen one dropout, and the program has funding to expand to 32 attorneys by 2022," Libby Leyden reports for The Daily Republic in Mitchell, South Dakota. Another group of 16 attorneys is in the process of being accepted and placed in communities, said Suzanne Starr, director of the Division of Policy and Legal Services at the Unified Judicial System.

But, "The true measure of real success will be who from the program stays after their fifth year," Starr told Leyden. "We have a lot of kids in law school that want to go home, back to these rural areas and practice law. We are probably going to fill up the next round pretty quickly."

from The Rural Blog http://ift.tt/2i8EWdy Innovative program brings attorneys to rural South Dakota - Entrepreneur Generations

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