Written by Staff Attorney Susan Soto
Groundbreaking innovation between lawyers and medical providers has quietly taken hold in far southwest Houston. Embedding a legal professional in a clinical setting is a research-proven way to improve community health and wellbeing by helping medical patients resolve civil legal issues before they develop into health-harming legal issues.
Formalized in May 2024 when a full-time staff attorney was hired to lead the medical-legal partnership (MLP), the partnership between Houston Volunteer Lawyers and AccessHealth celebrates its two-year anniversary this month and has helped close to 1000 clinic patients in Fort Bend and Waller Counties since its inception. Today, the MLP features an on-site staff attorney, a Legal Access Fellow on a two-year fellowship with the Economic Justice Initiative who increases the program’s reach, annual wills & estate planning clinics, legal information sessions and community outreach. We’ve built the program for AccessHealth patients who have no other way to access legal assistance and for area lawyers who want to make a difference in this legal desert so close to metropolitan Houston.
Do you live in Fort Bend or Waller County and want to give back to your community in a meaningful way? Do you want to learn more about the medical-legal partnership movement and get involved in the first MLP in Fort Bend County? Or, maybe you’re a fairly new lawyer and you want to take advantage of HVL’s top-notch mentoring program and CLE offerings for volunteer attorneys? Whatever your “why” is, working with a patient from AccessHealth is sure to be a rewarding experience for you and an improvement in the patient-client’s quality of life. We’d love to call you a friend of the MLP as you join the dozens of area attorneys who have already taken a case from our program! We will support you every step of the way as you assist with a simple family law case, an estate planning matter, a disability benefits application, or perhaps even a guardianship case. After all, legal care IS health care, and volunteering is a chance to change lives.
Learn about MLP cases at https://www.makejusticehappen.org/get-involved/take-a-case/?_case_search_facet=accesshealth
