Rural lawyers in demand Every attorney makes a difference in a small town

By Sam Easter

Chris Nyhus grew up in Harvey, North Dakota, a small town in Wells County of about 1,650 people. After years in the Bismarck area – as a prosecutor and in private practice – he found his way back home.

Nyhus Law Firm has offices both in Harvey and in Bismarck, a headquarters-and-branch model that he sees as essential to meeting rural North Dakotans where they are. That was crucially important, he recalls, during the pandemic.

Chris nyhus

“When COVID hit I did some deathbed wills,” he said. “Some of them were 30 miles out in the country. And I stood at the threshold of their farmhouse; they couldn’t leave. And a week later, they passed away.

And for that, it is a privilege — for the lawyer — to be able to help somebody in that position at that time of their life.”

Most critically, he said, those crucial moments happen far less often when a community lacks a local attorney — one who can help them navigate wills and contracts and everything else that requires an attorney to go smoothly.

“You have a lot of handshake deals, which leaves a lot of unstated terms, which — and I’m not saying that for the simple things that everybody needs a lawyer for everything,” he said. “But I think they maybe take it too far.” continued on page 24 continued from page 22

Nyhus is part of a smaller and smaller group of lawyers with a practice in rural areas, a sector of the legal profession that’s been drained as new, young attorneys increasingly seek legal representation in larger cities. The reasons are many — from perceived higher pay to mentorship — and the consequences are significant.

“I do it as a service to the local community up there, because number one, you know, they need to be able to walk in the door and sit down across the table from somebody,” Nyhus said of his work in the Harvey area. “Otherwise, the ramification of that is people will sometimes choose not to consult with an attorney. And that’s to their detriment in many respects, whether it’s a real estate transaction, or estate planning or other stuff.”

According to a 2020 American Bar Association survey, nearly 77% of all of North Dakota’s lawyers were concentrated in its four largest counties — Burleigh, Ward, Cass and Grand Forks. In South Dakota, nearly 40% practiced in Minnehana County, where Sioux Falls is located, even though roughly a quarter of the state’s population lives there.

In Minnesota, the split is even more remarkable; Ramsey and Hennepin counties are home to about 69% of the state’s lawyers, and about one-third of its population.

Hannah Haksgaard is a law professor at the University of South Dakota who studies the rural lawyer shortage. She said there’s a long list of reasons why young law graduates head to urban areas — loan forgiveness programs are more easily accessible to graduates who take public-service jobs, which are more available in urban areas. Making those loan programs available to rural lawyers — whom Haksgaard said are surely doing an important public service — would be an important step, she said.

What’s more, If a lawyer’s spouse has a career, it’s probably easier for them to find their own job in a bigger city. And, most obviously: some lawyers just want all the amenities that urban living brings.

“One thing that I would say is, I think every lawyer makes a difference in our smallest communities. And so we might only be talking about a town of 600 people has one lawyer. But when that one lawyer retires, without a replacement, it means there’s no one local to provide legal services.”

It’s difficult to quantify the problem — how, after all, does one measure legal access? There are bound to be more lawyers in big centers of government and business, after all. But Haksgaard points out that the problem is likely to worsen, no matter how it’s measured.

“We have what I would call a graying bar. So our attorneys, especially in rural areas, are getting older, and they’re nearing retirement,” she said. “And so the raw numbers probably would give you a more optimistic view than you should have, because a lot of those lawyers are phasing into retirement with no replacements. Which is concerning.”

Patrick Sinner is an attorney with

Vogel Law Firm, which is based in urban hubs in North Dakota and Minnesota. He said that many attorneys are drawn to larger cities because of the opportunities for mentorship. It’s also a different experience, he said, to specialize in one field of law in a bigger city, instead of working broadly for a wider range of smaller, rural clients.

“To be a rural attorney, I think a lot of times requires you to be a generalist in anything that might come in the door, from doing wills and trusts or doing land disputes, divorces, criminal actions, up through civil litigation and setting up LLCs or companies, and that can be a little bit daunting,” he said.

And he pointed out, too, that remote technologies like Zoom are making the legal world smaller all the time — and that the law is trending toward a more online, tech-friendly future.

“That certainly seems to be the trend,” he said. “If nothing else, the COVID pandemic has made a lot of courts much more open and amenable to having not only telephone hearings, but Zoom hearings for everything up to and including trials. Which would be unheard of before the lockdown happened.”

For Nyhus, though, his chief concern is that Zoom can’t replicate the feeling of being in the room — and he worries that without lawyers actually present in rural areas, there are still needs that go unmet.

“With technology, there are a lot of ways you can work through some of the negative factors,” he said — but it only goes so far. “Nothing, nothing takes the place of a face-to-face consultation with the door closed.”