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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
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And I'm Audie Cornish. Plenty of young, aspiring lawyers dream of landing jobs at high-powered big city firms, so to them, an internship in a sleepy rural town might not sound like a dream summer job. But that's what three law schools in Iowa and Nebraska are encouraging their students to consider. New law school grads are facing one of the worst job markets in decades and, as Iowa Public Radio's Sarah McCammon reports, some say working in smaller towns is looking more appealing.
SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: I'm in downtown Garner, Iowa, if you could call it that. It's a small town. I'm on the main drag here, which is dotted with a few businesses, a coffee shop, a restaurant, some furniture and clothing stores. Also on this main drag, you will find the law office of Phil Garland.
PHILIP GARLAND: OK. Marilyn, you hadn't met Kay before, but she's been with me this summer and...
MARILYN: OK.
GARLAND: ...so she's going to explain a couple of things here.
MCCAMMON: Garland has been practicing law here in this town of about 3,000 for more than three decades, since before his 22-year-old summer intern, Kay Oskvig, was born. She just finished her first year of law school at the University of Iowa. Today, she's advising 83-year-old Marilyn Hayes, who wants to pass her family farm on to her seven children.
KAY OSKVIG: OK. So, Marilyn, what I've been doing is researching your basis in the land, which is kind of the amount of investment that the IRS considers for tax purposes.
MARILYN: Sure.
OSKVIG: And so, when I was preparing the deed...
MCCAMMON: Oskvig is part of a new program offered by her law school, plus Drake University in Des Moines and Creighton in Omaha. They're pairing a handful of law students with rural firms. Oskvig grew up in a small town, but says she hadn't thought about practicing law in one until now.
Phil Garland, her mentor this summer, is on the Iowa Bar Association committee that organized the internship program, which they're hoping to expand next year.
GARLAND: It's sort of a - what we call a kick the tires program. You get a chance to know the student. You get to have the chance to have the student have some real hands-on experience, see if you've got a good relationship between the two of you, they like the town. It's a pretty minimal cost.
MCCAMMON: The American Bar Association hasn't collected data on rural law firms in more than a decade, but as younger professionals gravitate toward urban life, Garland says many older, small town lawyers are nearing retirement with no one to fill their shoes. Some areas have just a few attorneys for an entire county.
About three hours south in Albia, Iowa, John Pabst works out of an old Victorian house. Pabst doesn't have anyone waiting in the wings, so he's also taken on a law student this summer who will have to adapt to the small town.
JOHN PABST: If you're a single person in Monroe County, Iowa, unless you have local connections, it's not what I would call a hot spot for social activity.
MCCAMMON: Maybe not, but many recent law grads can't afford to be quite so picky. A report from the National Association for Law Placement last year called the market for entry level lawyers the worst in 30 years. Those big city law firms aren't hiring at the pace they used to and fewer than half of newly minted lawyers found jobs in private firms.
But Kay Oskvig thinks she may have a better shot at employment in a rural area. Already, she's getting hands-on experience, working a variety of cases with a veteran attorney and even getting paid while many of her classmates are interning for free with large firms. And she isn't stressing about her social life, either.
OSKVIG: I think there are places to meet people. There are always opportunities. They might be different places, so instead of, you know, at a bar or a social hour on a Friday night, you might be set up by somebody's grandmother, so it's - you know, it's kind of a different way of doing things.
MCCAMMON: And while Oskvig still has two years to go before she makes up her mind, she says her path to the law career she wants just might wind through a small town.
For NPR News, I'm Sarah McCammon.
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