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May 12, 2025
Alia Attallah’s shift from professional actor to law school student was unexpected. But so was going to court two years ago to take out a restraining order against her former boyfriend.
“I had never thought twice about the law until I needed the law’s protection,” Attallah tells SFR.
Newly accepted to the University of New Mexico law school, Attallah’s personal journey intersects with a critical problem facing the state: diminishing numbers of lawyers leaving vulnerable people—rural and lower income residents in particular—unable to find help when they need it most. Experts refer to this as the justice gap—and behind each instance lies a story like Attallah’s.
The 34-year-old actress has a master’s degree from New York University and screen credits that include the CBS television show Elementary and NBC’s The Blacklist. Until recently, she split her time between Santa Fe, Los Angeles and New York. During one stint in Santa Fe, her life took a turn with a toxic relationship she says led to a physical attack and months of harassment.
When she sought an order of protection, the man came to court with an experienced local attorney who slapped Attallah with a counter petition. Like many litigants who choose to represent themselves, she felt outgunned and hired a pro. Even so, Attallah pored over law books, researched evidence rules for the hundreds of text messages sent to her phone and generally obsessed about the case.
A month later, a District Court judge granted her petition and dropped his. She went back to New York to audition for pilot season, but her mind had opened to a new possibility.
“I was realizing what a difference the law had made in my life,” Attallah says. “The fact that it was there as something I could grab onto and rely on, and that justice had really won out, that the truth had been seen.”
She’ll be pushing 40 by the time she takes the bar exam in three years or so, but Attallah would still be on the younger side of New Mexico’s pool of lawyers. The average age of lawyers across the state is 52; it’s as high as 58 in some judicial districts.
That lawyers are aging out of the profession is a window on a deeper problem identified by a New Mexico Supreme Court working group assigned last year to dig into the state’s “access to justice gap.” That justice gap translates as roadblocks stacked in front of residents who need the courts to resolve everything from divorces to landlord-tenant disputes to wrongful deaths at the hands of government employees or large corporations.
In a 47-page report the working group delivered to the Supreme Court late last year, which the court formally adopted in January, authors say the justice gap impacts rural New Mexicans the most, along with low-and-middle-income residents: More than half the state’s residents can’t afford legal services for civil matters. Right now, some counties lack any lawyers, while applications to law schools have been on the decline. Moreover, the gap doesn’t stop at lawyers but can be felt across the entire legal spectrum.
In interviews with SFR, judges, lawyers and the dean of the UNM law school acknowledged the gap, and endorsed some of the working group’s recommendations to close it, including providing financial incentives for lawyers who choose to practice in rural areas. None of the proposals offer a rapid solution.
In 2019, New Mexico averaged one lawyer per 430 people—just about the same as the national average a decade ago, according to recent state bar reports and a nationwide study.
But the numbers skew wildly between urban and rural counties. Santa Fe, for instance, has one lawyer for every 147 residents, while Guadalupe County has just one for every 4,341, the new workgroup study says.
“I was shocked to learn that three counties don’t have a single lawyer,” Santa Fe plaintiffs attorney Kate Ferlic says. “I personally like the David and Goliath fight, but when individuals don’t have access to a lawyer to fight a corporation or fight a building owner that is not maintaining the apartments that they live in, those people are left without a remedy.”
Ferlic, a 40-year-old who’s the second name in the Egolf + Ferlic + Cox + Martinez firm, went to law school after four years as a journalist. She works mostly on contingency, and approximately 40% of her clients are from outside Santa Fe, especially in wrongful death, sex abuse, catastrophic injury and civil rights cases.
“The real need in the state in rural communities is probably more likely family law and landlord-tenant issues and things like that, where the disputed value of a case can be low and sometimes difficult to litigate because the cost of litigation is so high that it largely makes it not worth it to pursue,” Ferlic says. Of course there’s no value on the safety of children or the security of housing, but “the reality is that a lot of people spend a lot of money fighting on these issues. And when one party has resources and one does not, real injustice can occur.”
Chief Justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court Judith Nakamura made the rounds before lawmakers earlier this year, and the low lawyer inventory was among her talking points. Before committee after committee during the session, she reiterated the startling statistic to which Ferlic refers: Of New Mexico’s 33 counties, a third have 10 or fewer attorneys, 20% have five or fewer and three have no active attorneys at all.
“We are now experiencing what a lot of the nation is, this shrinking pool of attorneys,” she told senators in late January.
At the same time, Nakamura was in the Roundhouse to ask for money to expand the number of judgeships in the state, which was one of the judiciary’s priorities from this year’s session. A workload study conducted by the National Center for State Courts showed a need of about 17 judgeships. The state appropriated money to add five of those positions this year.
Part of the shortfall comes straight back to the issue of attorneys.
“Even though throughout the state we are seeing a slippage in the number of new case filings, we’re seeing an increase in the number of hearings,” the chief justice said. “Why? A lot of it is due to self-represented litigants. More people are representing themselves, and there are more hearings to help folks navigate the judicial system. It does not go as quickly as when lawyers are involved.”
Nakamura told lawmakers the courts have already taken a number of recent steps to make the law more accessible to people who don’t hire lawyers, including simplification of common forms and an online “virtual receptionist” that speaks Spanish and Diné as well as English.
The court adopted several ideas from the working group of lawyers, judges, paralegal experts and academics geared at addressing the lawyer shortage, which included recruiting lawyers from other states and creating an official program to help self-represented litigants navigate the courts. So far no one has estimated what these ideas will cost.
The working group initially formed to consider allowing non-licensed legal professionals to perform services that right now only lawyers can do. That idea, though adopted by the court, is moving the slowest.
And then there’s the issue of the next generation of lawyers. One adopted idea would include student loan forgiveness and/or stipends for attorneys who go to work in rural communities. But law schools are having problems of their own.
Attallah took her time to prep and pass the LSAT and to learn about the judicial system before she applied. She shadowed Ferlic over several months on several occasions and spent lots of time with a different lawyer who represented her in the order of protection case. She says the idea of working on family law and domestic violence definitely appeals to her, but she is still figuring it out.
UNM law school applications have been on a steady decline for the last five years, with 339 in 2014 and 273 in 2019, and the current class is 14% smaller than the one from two years ago, the report cites. Those trends, the school’s dean Sergio Pareja says, respond to unemployment rates.
Meanwhile, Pareja is dealing with potential delays to the admission season and the start of classes for the new crop of law students amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The school began preparing for online learning in mid-March.
“Kind of the weird silver lining on the downturn that seems to be hitting the country and the world right now is that historically when the economy has gotten bad, like in 2008 or 2012 right after it tanked, our applications went through the roof,” Pareja tells SFR. “We had over double the number we have now. Law school applications then shot up for the same reason, people couldn’t get a job and they applied to law school…but who knows, there are tons of variables.”
The school canceled a prospective applicants’ activity that had been planned for April 3, and normally would be giving law school tours and classroom visits right now, “but all of that is canceled because of COVID-19,” he says.
Even before that, Pareja recognized a problem for which he had not landed on a solution.
