The shortage of lawyers in rural areas has long worried—and frankly stumped—the leadership of the State Bar of Georgia, as well as their counterparts in some other states.

They'll be getting some help thinking through the problem Tuesday. The American Bar Association is hosting a virtual event on Zoom titled "Legal Deserts in America: A threat to justice for all."

"Large swaths of rural America lack access to attorneys—including parts of most states," the ABA said in its invitation to the event. "As a new chapter in the second annual 2020 ABA Profile of the Legal Profession, the ABA gathered information from each of the 50 states and created what is believed to be the most comprehensive set of maps showing where U.S. practicing lawyers are located and where they are missing. The result presents a startling portrait of the lack of legal access in much of rural America, and the challenge that poses for policymakers and the legal profession in their quest for equal justice for all. Please join us to explore the impact of these legal deserts in America and what can be done about them."

ABA President Judy Perry Martinez of Simon, Peragine, Smith & Redfearn in New Orleans will moderate a panel discussion starting at 11 a.m. Tuesday.

Speakers include: Lauren Sudeall, associate professor at Georgia State University College of Law; Lisa R. Pruitt, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law; and Patrick G. Goetzinger, founder of Project Rural Practice, a South Dakota initiative.

Goetzinger is a partner in the Rapid City law firm Gunderson, Palmer, Nelson & Ashmore. He serves on the ABA Board of Governors and is past president of the South Dakota State Bar Association. He is known as a trailblazer in legal deserts and helped persuade the South Dakota Legislature in 2013 to approve a program to restock rural main streets with attorneys and improve access to justice in rural areas. The two professors wrote a Harvard Law & Policy Review article called, "Legal Deserts: A Multi-State Perspective on Rural Access to Justice," published in 2018.

It has been five years since newly sworn-in bar president Patrise Perkins-Hooker made it her mission to do something to help the six rural counties in Georgia with no lawyers and many with only a handful. She asked the Georgia Legislature to approve a bill that would have offered law school student loan debt forgiveness for new JDs who located in rural areas. But the bill never made it to the floor for a vote.

The ABA's current count of Georgia's statistics show little improvement if any.

"Georgia has 32,000 lawyers, but they are not evenly spread across the state," ABA Communications Manager Marc Davis said. "There are large swaths of legal deserts. The national average is four lawyers for every 1,000 residents, but 88 of Georgia's 159 counties have less than one lawyer per 1,000. Four counties (Baker, Clay, Echols and Webster) have no lawyers. Another 15 counties have only one or two."