Dayton Chronicle - Your Hometown News Source

DAYTON–Local folks know the advantages of living here...quiet streets, friendly faces, how relatively more relaxed the pace of life is here compared to the big city.

Late last year, the Washington State Bar News featured two Dayton attorneys, Kim Boggs and Ryan Ortuno of Boggs Ortuno PLLC, in its cover story by Colin Rigley entitled "Lawyers Gone Rural." The piece took an in-depth look at small-town law practices in Dayton, South Bend and Colville.

The segment on Boggs and Ortuno is entitled: Back by Dinner: Finding Work-Life Balance in a Rural Law Firm."

Rigley recounts former Southern California resident Ortuno's personal trials and travails in a "major" law firm in Los Angeles in the three-plus-page spread which pictures the two partners in front of the office's windows with the historic Columbia County Courthouse reflected in one of the panes. Additional photos depict the firm's subsidiary's title records and the ornate Columbia County courtroom.

Ortuno was on the partner track at a Los Angeles firm which enabled him to purchase a home in Southern California with his spouse Sarah and three children. Financial obligations required him to take out a number of loans to cover not only normal living expenses, but also make payments on his law-school loan. The obligations were so onerous, Ortuno worked long hours and hardly saw his children.

"If I was lucky, I'd maybe give the oldest one a bath and read a book to the second one," Ortuno is quoted in the article.

The mantra from law school was to move to a large city, get hired by a major law firm, work hard to make partner then reap the "luxuries" that accrue to the position, Ortuno said in the article. He was on that treadmill until he and his wife said "What the heck are we doing?"

In 2017, the Ortunos ditched Orange County for Columbia County, Sarah's hometown.

As far as the difference, Ortuno is frank: "The good thing here...most of the time when I'm completely under water, I enjoy what I do," he said, noting that wasn't true at his former job.

For Ortuno, the lifestyle has had another surprising payoff: he has put more money toward reducing his law-school debt in two years in Dayton than in ten years in Southern California.

Boggs's portion of the piece describes the route she navigated from the University of Puget Sound School of Law and the "exceedingly brief stop in the Bay Area" before she hurried back to Dayton, because big-city life didn't have that much appeal.

She started at Nealey and Marinella, taking a full-time position at a time when, in addition to the firm's title business, it was also the office of the Columbia County Prosecuting Attorney. While in law school, Boggs became a Rule-9 Licensed Intern at Nealey and Marinella, the article noted.

As a result of the piece's publication last November, Boggs received a request from Justice Mary I. Yu, asking if she would present to newly minted attorneys the points iterated in the article: how to be not only a good attorney, but also a good human being. "She was interested in how we balance our lives," Boggs said. "How we seek balance."

"It's good to be recognized by other attorneys and be recognized by a Washington Supreme Court Justice," she said.

Rural lawyering does have its shortcomings, Boggs says. The lack of attorneys in sparsely populated Garfield and Columbia counties requires attorneys like Boggs to travel to nearby courts to represent clients. "There are no other practicing civil attorneys in Asotin," Boggs said. "They struggle to get civil defense attorneys.

"It's a problem most people are not aware of because they're lucky enough not to need an attorney," she said.

Ortuno also refers to the dearth of legal representation in the article. "Every time a new person gets admitted to the bar around here, [we] have a celebration," he is quoted as saying.

Rural attorneys also face the "serious" challenge of graduating from law school with sizeable debt. "Like the way the lack of doctors impact rural health care," Boggs said, "so do young professionals gravitate to big cities because of the higher salaries" and the subsequent impacts on rural legal representation.

"Ryan and I are trying to say in the article aimed at lawyers who've started their careers and are not satisfied with their non-legal parts of their lives, to come to a smaller community and they will find it is very rewarding," Boggs said.