No lawyers for miles: Rural Colorado’s shortage of attorneys is “hitting a crisis point”

Attorney Kim Verhoeff has taken to recruiting her neighbors to the legal profession.

By that definition, 23 Colorado counties are legal deserts and about 261,000 people — 4.5% of the state’s population — live in those legal deserts, The Denver Post found.

But if she quits working, the clients she’s served for 26 years will have no one else to turn to, she said. So come Oct. 1, she’s semi-retiring. She’ll stop taking new clients and she hopes to work no more than two days a week.Stolz left a career in corporate law in 1997 after meeting her husband in an AOL chatroom and moved to Burlington, a Colorado town of about 3,000 nestled along Interstate 70 a few miles from the Kansas border.

In Denver, 79% of such litigants did not have attorneys. In Boulder, Gilpin and Jefferson counties, 70% of those litigants went unrepresented. Managing attorney Erin Harris, left, and paralegal Aricka Hulsey work at Colorado Legal Services in La Junta on Thursday, July 6, 2023. Hulsey said she chose to come back to the small town to work because of her roots and ability to connect better with community members. “I went away and I came back,” Hulsey said. “And it’s a blessing and it’s a curse. But mostly a blessing. Because my roots are here. My family’s here. I’m comfortable here.

Defendants exit Chief Judge Mark MacDonnell’s courtroom at the Otero County Courthouse in La Junta on Thursday, June 29, 2023. The issue of legal deserts isn’t a new problem, and it’s not unique to Colorado. The number of rural attorneys has been dwindling for years across the United States. But while some states have robust, years-old programs aimed at bolstering the number of rural attorneys, Colorado does not.

The Office of Alternate Defense Counsel, which provides attorneys to indigent defendants when the public defender’s office cannot, this year launched its, which aimed to place two attorneys in rural areas specifically to work as alternate defense counsel. The incentive programs for rural attorneys in Colorado are small-scale, Lee acknowledged, but she said even small shifts in the legal landscape can have an out-sized impact in rural areas.

Law Law Latest News, Law Law Headlines

Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.

Legal Cage Match: Elon Musk Threatens to Sue Facebook over Zuckerberg's Twitter CloneTwitter is considering legal action against Facebook (now known as Meta) over Threads, its recently launched Twitter clone. Elon Musk said in a tweet that, “Competition is fine, cheating is not.”
Source: BreitbartNews - 🏆 610. / 51 Read more »

Twitter threatens legal action against Meta over its new rival app ThreadsTwitter has threatened legal action against Meta over its new text-based app called Threads.
Source: chicagotribune - 🏆 8. / 91 Read more »