What Happens When The Only Lawyer In Town Retires?

Craig Morlang met Brent Frary only once, very briefly, in a courthouse outside the rural town of Cobleskill, New York, before offering him the chance to take over Morlang's practice.

Frary was appointed by the state in 2024 to help an elderly woman with dementia who was an heir to a local estate and represented by Morlang. It was love at first filing, Frary said.

"He said, 'I like your report. There's so much business here. We're hurting for attorneys. I'm retiring, but I don't want to leave my clients without anybody to go to,'" Frary told Law360 Pulse.


At the time, Frary was an associate at small trust and estates firm Cioffi Slezak Wildgrube PC in the nearby city of Schenectady. He initially declined the offer, but Morlang eventually convinced him to visit his office in Cobleskill, a village of about 4,000 people nestled in Schoharie County. Despite being home to a hamlet called "Lawyersville," the county was deemed an "emerging legal desert" by Iowa State in 2025.

There, in the single-story building with a red tin roof and sandwiched in between an Ace Hardware and a grocery store, Frary found an unplugged printer and office supplies scattered on Morlang's desk.

Morlang told Frary, "I'll send you all my clients, and I'll leave everything here on the table."

That Morlang was ready to hand over his clients to Frary after reading one legal report is emblematic of how challenging it can be for retiring attorneys in rural areas to find successors for their practices.


More than 20% of rural lawyers are over the age of 65, according to a 2022 study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And as law school becomes more expensive, young lawyers seek lucrative opportunities at larger firms, making them less likely to take over a rural practice.

Although Cobleskill is just an hour outside of Albany, young lawyers willing to plant themselves out in the country are "few and far between," Frary said.

The American Bar Association estimates there are nearly 1,300 counties, or roughly one-third of all the counties in the U.S., where there is one or no attorney per 1,000 residents.

The consequences are far-reaching, affecting both the local economy and the well-being of rural communities. These same economic factors also contribute to the expansion of such legal deserts across more parts of the country.

Most rural attorneys work until they die or else close up shop upon retirement, said Timothy Brouillette, the founder of the six-attorney firm Brouillette Troshynski Kingston Jackson PC in North Platte, Nebraska, in Lincoln County, which borders a cluster of eight counties in the state that have no resident attorneys at all.

For attorneys in rural counties hours away from metropolitan hubs, where they could be the only lawyer serving a population with a plethora of legal needs, the hope that a young attorney like Frary will take their place has become increasingly far-fetched, he said.

"If they don't have a McDonald's, it's going to be hard to get anybody to go there," Brouillette said.

Many rural or sparsely populated communities have legal needs that continue to grow, making succession planning all the more important.

As practices around them wind down, rural lawyers are getting more work at age 75 than they ever did before, said Tom Lenfestey, a North Carolina tax and estate planning lawyer and the founder of The Law Practice Exchange LLC, a consulting firm that helps attorneys buy, sell or plan the succession of law practices.

"There's some emotional aspect to legacy, identity that keeps us practicing, but I do think that especially in these smaller towns, they feel the burden," Lenfestey said. "They feel it's an obligation because they've been in that community for potentially 40, 50 years, serving it. The overall feeling is, 'What do I do to carry that forward? If I leave, if I shut down this firm, if I retire, what happens to my community?'"

When Morlang pitched taking over his business to Frary, he framed it as a bounty, not a burden — and Frary said the older attorney was right. He started taking on Morlang's clients while still working for Cioffi Slezak, but eventually launched his own firm, Frary Law PLLC, where he practices with his wife, who is also an attorney.

"I'm amazed at how much business there is out here," Frary said. "There's a real need."

It's not only solo practitioners who can capitalize on the potential in legal deserts. Small and mid-sized firms have a goldmine of untapped opportunity to get a foothold in communities where they don't yet have a physical presence by partnering with attorneys who are eyeing retirement, or buying their business outright, said attorney Brian King. King has adopted such a model with his firm King Law based in Rutherford, North Carolina.

"I hate the word legal desert," King said. "I hate hearing those kinds of things because how am I going to attract people if you keep calling it a desert? Let's talk about opportunities."


No Clear Successor

Brouillette said he had a law clerk a few years ago whom he hoped to bring on as an associate once she graduated law school. However, she opted to leave the firm because in North Platte, where some joke there are "more cows than people," there were "no men" for her to date.

He said he "searched like heck" to find her a boyfriend — "maybe a doctor or something like that" — but to no avail.

For lawyers in even smaller towns, attracting young associates to their practice can seem hopeless, so many forgo succession planning altogether.

Brouillette himself has closed out the practices of several attorneys, two of whom died suddenly. He said winding down those two practices in particular was a grueling affair. One lawyer had "no records on a computer at all," Brouillette said. His client list was written in pencil on a Rolodex.

The Nebraska Supreme Court adopted a rule at the start of 2025 requiring attorneys to designate another lawyer who will handle the winding down of their practice. Other states including Illinois, Arizona, Iowa and New Jersey have implemented similar requirements, and many now offer succession-planning services or guides.

The State Bar of Texas has an electronic form, in which an attorney can officially designate a practice custodian in case of emergency. Attorneys also can volunteer to be appointed as a custodian for a practice that needs one.

Sharon Sandle, the Texas bar's director of law practice resources, said her office has fielded emergency calls over hearings and trial dates in cases where an attorney had died, and no one knew what to do. Since the bar started offering more resources around 2023, however, "we're not seeing that kind of frantic situation."

Still, rural lawyers face other challenges.

"[The process is] really easy," Sandle said. "But I'm very well aware that the big barrier is you have to find a colleague who is willing to do that and talk to them about it and make those plans."

Of Counsel

In many ways, Morlang and Frary's situation, in which a younger attorney can pick up from where a retiring lawyer leaves off, is the ideal scenario for most rural lawyers looking to retire.

But that is becoming exceedingly rare, Lenfestey said. Individual lawyers interested in buying or taking over small-town practices are few and far between. But filling in are small to mid-sized law firms, often bringing the existing lawyers on board as of counsel and gradually absorbing their work.

The problem, though, is that many small-town attorneys envision their successor being someone like them, a pillar of the community. More realistically, the acquiring firms are likely to staff the practice with a paralegal during the week and send an attorney when needed for court appearances and client meetings.

Camille Stell, who consults with small firms about their succession plans as president of Lawyers Mutual Consulting and Services, said that for many of these lawyers, their identity is wrapped up in serving their community's legal needs. And they worry about a firm replacing them that's not "in the fabric" of the rural town they serve.

"[If their successor is] not showing up for chamber of commerce meetings and town council on Tuesday night, and running into community members at the local diner, they worry that the law firm services might suffer as a result," she said.

Brouillette said his firm has taken over dozens of rural solo practices over the years, but as a rural attorney himself, he understands the importance of meeting those clients face-to-face.

"The larger firm has to be committed to — I don't care if it's a one-year associate — send somebody out here for a couple of weeks to meet with the folks," Brouillette said.

Seeing the Potential

More small to medium-sized firms are considering the benefits of taking over a small-town practice and the commitment required to do so.

King said he built his Rutherford, North Carolina, firm on this idea of meeting communities where they are. Since 2002, King Law has grown from a solo practice into a 65-attorney firm now worth $20 million, he said.


The majority of King Law's 27 offices across North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee are in rural areas, where King has either bought a retiring lawyer's practice or brought an established attorney on board. He said the firm has purchased 11 firms over the past five years.

In many cases, the attorneys that King approaches, or vice versa, aren't fully ready to retire, but they want to reduce their practice. With his firm's more modern technology, he's able to take over their administrative tasks and perhaps pair the attorney with one of the dozens of younger lawyers he has recruited through the firm's 10-week summer law clerk program.

The program trains law school students in a full mock courtroom constructed in the firm's Rutherford headquarters. One such solo-practice attorney King brought into the firm now teaches one of the internship courses.

"It's like gold. He's had 30 years of experience and is great at retaining clients," King said. "He doesn't have to hang it up completely. He can play a lot of golf and go around the world and do the things that he wants to do."

King said it's been worth it for him to buy rural legal practices. For an investment of $150,000 or $250,000, it gets him the names of potentially thousands of former clients who know that attorney's name, a website he can turn into a landing page for his own firm and a phone number he can have forwarded to his own intake team.


"While that may not be life-changing money, it does allow for us to be able to give continuity to [the attorney's old practice]," King said. "There's also a little bit of ego and pride and legacy that we want to make sure is being honored."

King said an attorney in a rural county can easily dominate the legal market, which will almost always result in profit even if fees and rates are a fraction of big-city costs.

Mid-sized firms like King's can easily turn a small-town solo practice that makes $500,000 per year into one that makes $1 million, because aging rural solo practitioners have a bandwidth that usually doesn't match the need in their area, especially as other attorneys around them retire, King said.

With modern technology, case management systems and a larger support staff at the hub, larger firms can take an attorney's existing business and then double it.

Lenfestey said if King's hub-and-spoke model catches on, rural attorneys in these "legal deserts" will begin to have far more options for winding their practices down.

"And so maybe it's not that associate that's going to come work for you for five years and then take the reins," Lenfestey said. "It's going to look a little bit different, but if you give yourself time and you find the right fit, it can work, and it can work really well."

--Additional reporting by Christine DeRosa, Lynn LaRowe and Tracey Read. Editing by Lakshna Mehta. Graphics by Jason Mallory.