In June at the annual Jackrabbit Bar Conference, for which delegates from South Dakota and similar states like Nevada, Montana and Wyoming will gather near Mount Rushmore, the new South Dakota law is expected to be high on the agenda.

The South Dakota model has also drawn interest in Iowa, where the 33 counties with the smallest populations, among 99 over all, contain fewer than 4 percent of the state’s lawyers.

“I sent it to our legislators,” Philip L. Garland, chairman of the state bar association’s rural practice committee and a lawyer in Garner, Iowa, said of the South Dakota law. Thirty years ago, he said, there were a dozen lawyers in his area. Now there are seven, none of them young.

Last year, the Iowa State Bar Association began encouraging law students to spend summers in rural areas in the hope they might put down roots. In Nebraska, the bar association organized rural bus tours for law students for the first time this year.

Here in South Dakota, Mr. Cozad, who is 86 and came as a boy with his homesteader parents from Iowa, said he had never imagined that younger lawyers would not follow him. Sitting in his modest paneled office, the shelves groaning under aging legal volumes, he said: “The needs of the people are still there. There is plenty of work and opportunity.”

That was evident on the day court was in weekly session in this town of 1,100. The lunch place at the Martin Livestock Auction, where 1,000 head of cattle had been sold the previous day, included a table of lawyers, the ones in suits, ties and no hats. All had driven more than two hours from Rapid City and Pierre, paid by Bennett County, which also pays to transport prisoners 100 miles away because it has no functioning jail.

“Between sending out prisoners to Winner and bringing in lawyers and judges, we are breaking the county budget,” said Rolf Kraft, chairman of the County Board of Commissioners.