APARTADO I. INFORMACIÓN SOBRE LAS APORTACIONES.
INSTITUTO ELECTORAL DE TAMAULIPAS CATÁLOGO DE CUENTAS
investing in partnership development, clarifying the scope of an MLP, navigating cultural
differences and demonstrating value arose time and again. The work value proposition for staff
engaged in MLPs also rated highly.
From the Field
Mairi McKeever, Attorney, Volunteer Legal Services Program San Francisco:
I don’t think it’s a good idea to put a new person in a situation like this because you have to be ready to lead a project, coordinate a project, to tease out legal issues, to teach others.
... you have to support that person because they are on their own. ... people dump every single issue in the world on them and think … that lawyers can solve everything and you have to really protect that person from thinking that that’s their job, to solve everyone’s problems.
Ellen Lawton, Attorney and immediate past Executive Director of the National Center for
Medical Legal Partnership:
Enconium [is] kind of watch word. [It’s] … not settling for less, in your legal partner or in your health care partner.
I think that achieving that cross-cultural understanding is pivotal, and understanding what’s a
35 APPENDIX A
relevant piece of information for you as a lawyer to share with healthcare provider and vice versa. [E]xamples of that are, I like to ask lawyers who are like … ‘I’m partnering with this pediatrician and they’re really great and they have this clinic and I’m really excited.’ And I say ‘Great, how many patient visits a year in that clinic?’ And they say, ‘I don’t know.’ And they go back and find out and come back and they say 40,000. ‘Okay, how many of those are low-income kids?’ ‘Oh ah, you know, that’s 10,000 kids.’ I say ‘Okay you’re going to be able to help about 200 of them. So how are you going to message that to the rest of the healthcare team – you’re one lawyer, there are 10 doctors, … 15 nurses and 4 social workers.’ So really understanding that even though you are meeting with a doctor, that doctor is representing an entire institution. That cross-cultural understanding doesn’t happen enough. People don’t do that kind of homework about each other.
There is a lack of bringing the MLP back home to the legal office that is very harmful to the legal partners’ sustainability strategy. So it becomes about the lawyer, 2 lawyers or the lawyer and para- legal that are focused on the clinic, they go off every week, they are so happy but they never bring the health care team back to the legal office to help build support for the program with all the other staff that are back there. So it becomes a very remote, boutiquey thing that people at the legal office don’t really have any familiarity with, and again that hurts sustainability. The reality is that this is a health care team that then becomes devoted to the lawyer or the legal team and they’ll do anything for them. …They want to give back to the legal team that’s brought them so much.
Dr Steven Blatt, Pediatrician, Upstate Golisano Children’s Hospital, Syracuse:
The holy grail of this is to find patients that the lawyer meets with and saves the hospital money, and then you can say we saved money for the hospital – what’s more, we did the right thing. And that’s a hard one to find but you don’t have to find too many of them to make your point. And we found a few.
[I]t really adds something that wasn’t there before to have the doctors and the lawyers in the same place. I think it makes me a better doctor and I think it makes the lawyer a better lawyer. And I think it helps our students learn too. Especially when we … intersect through the patients … And it’s very gratifying work and I think the people that do it enjoy it. It’s meaningful.
Jen Florey, Attorney, Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County:
…[S]pace logistics are often one of the biggest challenges, so make sure that you have anticipat- ed that up front and … where your attorney’s going to be, if you’re going to have law students and volunteers if they’re all going to be there at once, that you actually have enough space for them because sometimes there’s not always an understanding of the confidentiality that you need because a lot of our clients will tell lawyers or paralegals things that they wouldn’t tell the medical provider … - space is critical.
Pam Tames, former Director of Training at Medical-Legal Partnership | Boston:
…[I]f you are innovative you’re entrepreneurial, you like the idea of creating something, it’s still a work in creation … it is a great environment in which to be … I have met some of the most inter- esting, intelligent, fascinating people doing this work and all doing it with the goal of improving the health and wellbeing of individuals.
Renee (Erline) Murphy, Attorney, Children’s Law Center, Washington DC:
[T]he one thing that I really tell new lawyers is that you need to have good supervision. You need to have people who are supportive, who are going to help you figure out answers to problems even if they don’t have them themselves. Most of the time as supervisors do actually already know the answers but sometimes they’ll make you find it yourself … People who are going to have the time to spend with you because you’re new to help you develop the skills and the knowledge base that you’re going to need to do the work.
JoHanna Flacks, Attorney and Pro Bono Director, Medical-Legal Partnership | Boston:
[R]ecognising that as a law firm or your in-house legal department that may be accustomed to serving what has come to be a familiar group of business cultures [you] are now going to be doing what you do when you consider taking on new business clients, which is getting to know a little bit about the perspectives of that client who may be, from a business perspective, approaching things from a very culturally different point of view. Just to give you one example, a huge area that has happened for law firms in the US … is the IT boom, where law firms had to really adjust culturally to having fee-paying clients who were often under 30 and had a very different zeitgeist about engaging in business together, and law firms had to adjust to meet the needs of those clients. It’s not a question of right or wrong, it’s just a question of different cultural realities. So now law firms have adjusted in large part to having what’s called a ‘business casual’ style and it works really well for a lot of contexts and then in other contexts it doesn’t.
[T]his work for me is really motivating because … I really do believe that there is enormous com- mon ground among people who might not ordinarily be considered to have ground in common. Doctors or lawyers yes, but also large law firms and those that are doing public interest work, and I think it’s really valuable to think about those commonalities and find ways to work together to do what we all care about.