Firms Seek To Help 'Most Vulnerable' In Rural America

For about three hours every month, approximately a dozen Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck LLP attorneys gather in the firm's Denver office to provide free civil legal advice to seniors and low-income individuals who are scattered across some of the state's most remote areas.

More than half of Colorado's counties are classified as legal deserts or are teetering on the edge, according to research from the Colorado Access to Justice Commission. Offering advice by phone, the Brownstein Hyatt attorneys help solve matters in areas such as estate planning, housing, family law and consumer law. They serve as a lifeline for residents in areas with few lawyers.

"These people can't come in person to get legal services, but are in much need of them, and are sometimes the most vulnerable," Emily A. Ellis, a shareholder at Brownstein Hyatt, told Law360 Pulse. "You're trying to help them process what's going on and say, 'OK, let's take a second, what's going on? How can we help you?'"

While the Sixth Amendment guarantees a right to counsel for criminal defendants, there is no corollary right for people with civil legal needs. A 2022 study from the Legal Services Corp. found that low-income Americans did not receive adequate legal assistance for 92% of the civil legal problems that substantially affected their lives during the past year.

The American Bar Association estimates that more than one-third of all the counties in the U.S. — nearly 1,300 of them — have less than one attorney per 1,000 residents. The lack of legal services can have far-reaching consequences for local economies and the well-being of rural communities.

As part of their pro bono work, large and midsize law firms across the country regularly deploy resources to help people in counties with few lawyers. Multiple firms told Law360 that they rely on the guidance of nonprofit legal organizations whose deep community ties help them to strategically deploy resources.

Milbank LLP attorneys worked in 2024 and 2025 to help several undocumented individuals in remote areas of New Mexico secure special immigrant juvenile status. In Louisiana, Baker Botts LLP operates an annual clinic in St. James Parish to restore driver's licenses. In Tennessee, Bass Berry & Sims PLC has established conservatorships and wills for rural parents of children with disabilities and has provided over 585 hours of legal advice via a virtual clinic over the past two years, often reaching people in legal deserts.


Firms also frequently take on litigation with impacts in rural areas. In 2022, Stinson LLP filed a federal lawsuit alleging food assistance benefits were illegally denied. The next year, DLA Piper sued Alaska over Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program backlogs that left thousands of people without food stamps for months.

All these efforts relied on collaboration with nonprofits.

"I think the most effective model is certainly a partnership where there's a legal aid organization [that] understands the community they're serving and the substance of legal needs, and then the private firm contributes attorney capacity and expertise," Bethanie S. Mettling, the pro bono unit manager at Legal Aid of the Bluegrass in Kentucky, told Law360 Pulse.

A recent analysis of Census Bureau data conducted by a law professor at the University of Kentucky found that as of 2023, 30 of the state's 120 counties met the ABA definition of a legal desert. As part of an ongoing effort to help clients in some of the farthest reaches of the state, Legal Aid of the Bluegrass has been using virtual video platforms to connect remote clients with Kentucky-licensed attorneys from major firms who can assist with expungement of criminal records.

Some legal nonprofits maintain a list of open cases and send it to firms on a somewhat regular basis. They'll say, "'Here are open cases. Can anybody at Bradley assist with these?'" Tiffany M. Graves, Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP's pro bono counsel, told Law360 Pulse. "We get those referrals, particularly from those parts of states where people really do struggle to access services through those legal aid programs, and do everything we can as a firm to prioritize our assistance [in] those areas."

That kind of dynamic led to Brownstein Hyatt's Call4All Clinic, which was created in 2016 and now helps residents in 39 counties across Colorado. Colorado Legal Services approached the firm with an idea for providing legal advice in areas with few attorneys. Brownstein Hyatt's lawyers and the nonprofit organization's staff have offered civil legal advice to approximately 850 people and have referred hundreds of others who weren't low income or who needed help with legal problems the firm couldn't assist with.

Colorado Legal Services helped create a handbook for attorneys who would be fielding inquiries and screening callers ahead of time, to ensure they're eligible for the clinic. Nonprofit partner organizations commonly develop training materials in these kinds of partnerships, as pro bono attorneys may be assisting clients with matters outside the lawyers' typical area of expertise.

"Some attorneys just get very specialized," Cari King, co-director of the pro bono unit, partnerships and collaborations at Georgia Legal Services Program, told Law360 Pulse. "We try to provide really thorough trainings and work with them to make them comfortable before they come on board to do something like estate planning."

Community partners also bring crucial relationships with local residents.

"Trust building is key, and obviously, if you're providing services to somebody who [isn't] physically proximate to you, you need to come up with strategies for building that trust," Legal Services Corp. President Ronald S. Flagg told Law360 Pulse. "That's where legal aid can come in."

Major businesses are also involved in many efforts to provide legal services to rural residents. Loeb & Loeb LLP's multiyear collaboration with Paramount has included pro bono assistance for LGBTQ+ individuals in areas with limited legal resources.

Baker Botts partner Louie Layrisson credited Koch Inc. for approaching the firm and coming up with the idea that led to the creation of the driver's license restoration clinic in Louisiana's St. James Parish in 2024.

"The core problem we're trying to solve is a lack of mobility," said Layrisson, who is leading the firm's clinic this year. He added that by restoring driver's licenses, attorneys help clients access jobs, healthcare and other basic needs.

Nearly 300 people attended the first clinic, conducted in partnership with other law firms and the Louisiana Office of Motor Vehicles. Fifty-nine people walked out the same day with new driver's licenses, and 90 more went home with concrete reinstatement plans that offered step-by-step instructions on how to restore their licenses. Many of those who weren't able to leave the clinic with a license in hand had issues that needed to be resolved via the court system, like accrued fines. Last year, the clinic built out its program to include the 23rd Judicial District Court. That additional partnership allowed for the waiving of fines that could have prevented people from getting a new license.

Layrisson noted that short-term engagements provide high-impact ways for lawyers to help communities without committing to projects with unclear timelines.

"I think attorneys shy away from engagements that are months- and years-long because it's intimidating," Layrisson told Law360 Pulse.

Many legal issues, however, take that long to unravel fully.

"Very few legal problems get resolved in a two-hour window," Nikole Nelson, the founding CEO of Frontline Justice and former executive director of Alaska Legal Services Corp., told Law360 Pulse.

But initial conversations with lawyers at clinics and community events can help identify problems that can be addressed with legal remedies.

While traveling around rural Alaska and talking to people, "you would identify like seven or eight problems that people were telling you about, all of which had some legal solution," Nelson said. "You would find out that they thought that they owned the house that they lived in, but they didn't have [a] clear title to it, which is a legal problem. Or the landlord of their house wasn't making repairs, and how could they make that happen? Which is a legal problem. They didn't understand that to be a legal problem."

Growing use of videoconference platforms like Zoom has helped attorneys connect with rural communities.

Since 2021, Bradley Arant has established virtual clinics at its Nashville; Birmingham, Alabama; and Huntsville, Alabama, offices to provide free advice to business and nonprofit leaders.

The firm's attorneys offer contract review services, guidance on corporate governance and commercial lease advice to people nearby and hours away.

Remote meetings can facilitate more interactions in legal deserts by doing away with the need to travel long distances, said Ariana Sañudo, a full-time member of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP's pro bono team.

The firm regularly meets virtually with individuals from California's vast San Bernardino and Riverside counties to assist them with various small business legal needs.

"We've seen it work really well to transition to more virtual and remote options," Sañudo said.

Despite the increasing ways to reach clients, firms recognized that the assistance they can provide is limited compared with national need.

The ABA recommends that attorneys provide at least 50 hours of pro bono legal service each year. Not a single firm included in Law360's recent analysis of pro bono work reported that every attorney met that 50-hour threshold.

Firm pro bono leaders acknowledged that, for every person they help, many are not receiving legal help.

"The legal system's broken," Lucinda Smith, the pro bono coordinator for Bass Berry, told Law360 Pulse. "We can't just pro bono our way out."

Amid growing recognition that sweeping solutions are needed, firm leaders are thinking about how to address the conditions underlying the legal representation crisis.

Anthony Perez Cassino, Milbank's pro bono counsel, thinks BigLaw firms and nonprofits should scale and replicate partnerships in other legal deserts.

He believes three ingredients are key to success: the presence of local organizations to facilitate connections and BigLaw attorneys to fill gaps, the ability of lawyers to communicate with clients virtually, and the ability of attorneys to get temporary permission to practice in the state.


"That model would work anywhere in the country," Cassino said.

Quarles & Brady LLP senior pro bono counsel Dawn Caldart is leading a task force for the Wisconsin Access to Justice Commission that is presenting a petition to the state bar's Board of Governors on Friday to enable legal advocates to offer assistance for civil legal problems within their areas of expertise. The board is scheduled to vote on the petition in December.

"What the task force is proposing is the supervisory model, where a legal advocate is trained in a very small, discrete area of law — so child support, domestic violence, eviction, consumer debt — and they can help only in that area," Caldart told Law360 Pulse, noting that multiple Quarles & Brady attorneys were involved in drafting the rule. "They won't have broad authority under the rule, and they will only be able to give legal advice under the supervision of an attorney."

Caldart said new ways of thinking about legal services are needed, noting that members of the task force met with stakeholders in other jurisdictions that are trying to empower nonattorney workers to assist with legal problems.

"I think that we have to really look at innovation and new ways of delivery, like the healthcare field has done. You can enter the healthcare system [through] a nurse practitioner, a nurse, a physician's assistant, a doctor, a specialist, depending on what your needs are and your resources are," Caldart said. "But in law, we just have a lawyer, and now we're bottlenecked."

--Editing by Daniel King.