A Letter From the Chair

Welcome! As many of you know, my name is Angel Wawrzynek, and I am the Chair of the ISBA Rural Practice Section Council. The goal and purpose of the Rural Practice Section is to leverage ISBA resources to benefit rural and small town practitioners across the state. This is our second year as a section, and I could not be more excited! Thank you for joining me on this adventure!

By way of a recap, here are a few benefits created for rural practitioners over the past year. First, the ISBA Rural Practice Fellowship Program continues to gather support and interest from across the state. The fellowship program consists of two programs: the Rural Practice Summer Clerk Fellows Program and the Rural Practice Associate Fellows Program. As a reminder, the ISBA awards grants of $5,000 to law clerks and $10,000 to associate attorneys who are matched and selected through the fellows program. The application deadline was moved up this year and as such applications for the 2026-2027 fiscal year are closed. We have quite a few excellent fellows’ applications and a strong showing of law firms from across the state. Matches and grant awards will be announced sometime in December.

Second, rural practitioners in many counties are entitled to a discount on job postings through the ISBA job board. For more information and instructions to receive your discount code, please visit the job board website at https://isba-jobs.careerwebsite.com/employer/pricing/?site_id=10624.

Also the ISBA is working on revamping the Affiliated Bar Program. As part of that process, the ISBA now offers free webpages to affiliated local bars across the state. To apply to be a part of the affiliated bar program and/or to request an affiliated bar webpage, please have the local bar representative visit https://www.isba.org/affiliatedbars.

Meanwhile, the ISBA Statewide Calendar is also being improved to allow rural practitioners to find events in their regions more easily. The more local/rural bar events we can include on the Statewide calendar, the better. Please submit events to be included in the ISBA Statewide Calendar of Bar Events at https://www.isba.org/barnews/bar-calendar/form.

Not to mention, one of the most important services 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.

Members of the Rural Practice Section also have access to the Central Communities “listserve” where we may share information about legal updates or upcoming events, and where we may ask questions about anything from substantive practice questions, to procedural local questions, to referral recommendations.

Full circle, I encourage each of you to 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). The more attorneys in the section, the better our reach will be for spreading the word about new ISBA services and information.

On a final note, the Rural Practice Section Council intends to co-sponsor CLE with other sections/committees of the ISBA as well as with local bar associations. If you are aware of a CLE that the Rural Practice Section could or should co-sponsor, or if you would like for our section council to work with your local bar to coordinate a CLE, please contact adecarlo@isba.org.

Beyond that, please stay tuned as the Rural Practice Section Council works with ISBA staff to create additional benefits and modify existing programs. 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!