Report on the Pilot Project Connecting Urban Pro-Bono Lawyers with Rural Small Business Clients

We completed work and submitted our report to the California Lawyers Foundation regarding a pilot project providing services from urban pro bono lawyers to rural clients using virtual meeting technology.

California’s biggest cities have among the highest percentages in the world of lawyers to residents. They also have among the best pro bono legal cultures.  Private lawyers’ free legal work substantially adds to the capacity of legal aid nonprofits to meet the needs of people who can’t afford a lawyer.  Rural counties are a different story.  There are 84 lawyers total in Lake County, and only 24 in Lassen County. 

In 2022, California Lawyers Foundation agreed to provide $50,000 to fund the project. The goals were to establish a working, pilot-scale pro bono project connecting urban lawyers with rural clients and to learn how to replicate such a program for different subject matters, different kinds of rural clients, and different geographical areas in rural California. To run the pilot program the Access Commission engaged Mairi McKeever, who has decades of experience organizing and operating pro bono programs.  With assistance from Erika Frank, former General Counsel of the California Chamber of Commerce, Mairi cultivated relationships with organizations in rural Northern and Central California, expanding outreach to their neighboring counties.

Start Small Think Big is a national provider of pro bono legal services to low-income entrepreneurs with a California office in Oakland.  SSTB delivers almost all of its pro bono services using a digital application and virtual meetings between clients and their pro bono lawyers.  This made it feasible to construct a working program on the urban end of the pilot program.

Several months into the operation, we learned that it is essential to have compensated staff who are present in the rural areas to be served.  We engaged staff at the Central Valley Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, located in Stanislaus County, to recruit participants, assist them through the application process, and provide translation services.  From May 2022 to June 2023, 80 SSTB applications were submitted by businesses in the counties surrounding the organizations that have established formal SSTB partnerships – a 60% increase from the 50 applications that  were submitted from those same counties from March 2021 to April 2022.

Our report discusses lessons learned from the pilot, which we hope will assist ongoing and future efforts to employ the relative wealth of urban pro bono resources to benefit California’s rural communities.