On August 31, 2023, leaders from across the state of North Carolina—from the judiciary, the legal profession, and legal education—gathered at North Carolina State Bar headquarters in Downtown Raleigh to confront a pressing crisis: legal deserts.
A legal desert is “a county with one or fewer attorneys per 1,000 inhabitants.” They predominate in rural areas, such as the North Carolina counties of Camden, Gates, and Tyrrell.
This issue persists even beyond this state’s borders. As detailed by former ABA President Judy Perry Martinez in an article on legal deserts, “Nearly every state in the nation has large stretches of rural areas and counties with few lawyers in them—or no lawyers at all.”
So what’s the solution? North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Newby and the Chief Justice’s Commission on Professionalism (CJCP) are tilling for the answer. That’s why that body—with CJCP Co-Director James “Jimbo” S. Perry leading the charge—invited stakeholders from across the state to convene for the 2023 Legal Deserts Summit.
There, over thirty practitioners and thought leaders presented their vision for turning legal deserts into “legal oases.” The proposals recommended a variety of solutions, such as expanding awareness of the legal needs in rural areas, increasing funding to incentivize attorneys to locate in these areas, and training law students and new attorneys how to launch their own firms in these areas or join another practice to encourage firm succession planning.
In his presentation at the summit, High Point Law’s Founding Dean and Professor of Law Mark Martin outlined several initiatives the law school intends to implement to encourage HPU law students to become rural lawyers.
By adopting practical and impactful strategies, HPU Law can aid the efforts of the rest of the summit attendees so that rural residents of North Carolina obtain better legal services in their communities.
One of the few non-lawyers in the room, former Royal Navy Marine Dan Alexander, inspirationally charged summit attendees to break the legal desert problem into small goals, to have a spirit of triumph, and when faced with these obstacles, to say to themselves: “If I can, I will.”
The summit attendees are pictured above.