Welcome! As many of you know, my name is Angel Wawrzynek, and I am the Chair of the ISBA Rural Practice Section Council. I am very excited to be a part of this brand new section. The goal and purpose of the Section Council is to leverage ISBA resources to benefit rural and small town practitioners across the state. Thank you for joining me on this adventure!

In my opinion, the most important service that the Rural Practice Section can and should provide is connections: both to various ISBA resources and to each other and our respective networks of contacts and information. If in addition to other ISBA benefits, the Rural Practice Section can facilitate our ability as rural practitioners to share resources, contacts, and information amongst ourselves, we all stand to benefit enormously.

This newsletter is sent to members of the Rural Practice Section. We intend to use this newsletter to circulate articles and information from the various sections addressing substantive legal updates as well as addressing law practice management and other topics of interest to general rural practitioners.

So, I encourage each of you to: (1) tell your network of rural attorneys about the ISBA Rural Practice Section (and the fact that membership in this Section is free to ISBA members through June of 2026); and (2) join the ISBA Central Community for Rural Practice. The more attorneys in the section and the more attorneys who are a part of the ISBA Central Community, the better our reach will be for spreading the word about new ISBA services/information/etc. (and the better the possible responses to inquiries and information on this listserve).

I intend to use the ISBA Central Community for Rural Practice for several purposes initially. First, while I hope to develop a more formal system at some point, in the meantime, the ISBA Central Community should be able to help us refer cases to other rural practitioners.
Second, the ISBA Central Community is a great place to share information about upcoming CLE opportunities and interesting articles. To that end, if something of interest crosses your desk, I encourage you to share same with the Rural Practice Central Community.

Beyond that, hopefully you are all aware of the ISBA Rural Practice Initiative Fellowship Program, which was initiated during the 2020-21 bar year. The Fellowship Program consists of two programs: the Rural Practice Summer Clerk Fellows Program and the Rural Practice Associate Fellows Program. If you are interested in hiring a summer law clerk and/or an associate attorney, please consider applying to be part of the program. The ISBA award grants of $5,000 to law clerks and $10,000 to associate attorneys who are matched and selected through the Fellowship Program. As such, the program has generated a lot of interest from law students and attorneys interested in considering rural practice. Applications will be available in mid-November, with a deadline of February 7, 2025. Please contact me or Krista Appenzeller with questions regarding this program.

In addition to the above, I would like to highlight two benefits that the ISBA has rolled out in the past six months for rural practitioners. First, the ISBA has created a Law Practice For Sale page on the ISBA website, with the goal of allowing practitioners with goals of retirement to post general information about their law firms so that attorneys in other regions of the state can consider relocating to become part of the transition plan. Just last week, we saw the first ISBA member successfully sell their practice through the program. Second, the ISBA is offering a 50% discount on job postings when the job is located in a rural area. For more details, please visit https://isba-jobs.careerwebsite.com/employer/pricing/?site_id=10624.

Please stay tuned as the Rural Practice Section Council works with ISBA staff to create and roll out additional benefits. And in the meantime, thank you again for joining the Rural Practice Section! I look forward to working together to improve the practice of law for each and every one of us!