Amanda Kool On Solving America’s Rural Justice Gap

"Amanda Kool remembers listening to her law school peers describe their "average middle class" backgrounds during icebreaker sessions at the beginning of her first year.

"My mom lived in the trailer park and my dad did transient farm work and other side businesses," said Kool, who grew up in rural Kentucky. "I was like, wait, was that not middle class?"

The moment was just one of the many times Kool has noticed the rural-urban divide that permeates the legal community.

She knows the chasm well, having grown up and gone to college in Kentucky before attending law school at Northeastern University, working in the corporate sector at Nixon Peabody LLP and spending five years running the Community Enterprise Project, a clinical program at Harvard Law School.

While at Harvard, she helped shift the clinic's focus from primarily serving tech startups to serving more small, local community enterprises that needed help with business, finance and other transactional legal matters..."

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