Rural Lawyer is a blog about practicing law in rural America – out beyond the availability of broadband Internet and past the surburban sprawl where good neighbors are a mile down the road, the next lawyer is two towns over and the nearest Starbucks is a good hour away. It is having  your niche defined by your location and not by how you market your practice area.

Rural Lawyer is a relaxed, go to work in jeans and a jacket kind of place.

It is very difficult to know people and I don’t think one can ever really know any but one’s own countrymen. For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives’ tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can’t come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them. — W. Somerset Maugham

Rural Lawyer is about my practice and my experiences. It is the hearsay of my career and perhaps an invitation to a few daring souls to try their hand at rural lawyering.

Administrivia:

Posts are somewhat regular (there should be something new here monthly), coming when time and the muse allow (being a 1-man band operation, the general order of priority is clients, firm, farm, family, blog). I do try to respond to questions and comments on a timely basis — which leads to more frequent posting (hey, inspiration has to come from somewhere – I just can’t keep stalking it and clubbing it into submission).

On comments – yes they are moderated (my sandbox, my rules), yes I do read them and generally approve them (so don’t be shy, there’s a good chance your post will be approved). I tend not to approve posts that (a) are obvious spam, (b) are simply SEO sucking, gratuitous links to whatever website you are promoting, (c) devolve into obscenity (this is an english – well american – language blog folks, you know, the language of Shakespeare so if y’all want to be insulting, you can do better than resorting to monosyllabic gerunds), (d) are Reductio ad Hitlerum,  argumentum ad Hitlerum, ad hominem or ad misericordiam arguments (Godwin’s law applies here).