Medical-Legal Partnership

Legal issues, both civil and criminal, are important social determinants of health (or SDOH) and may significantly affect a patient’s ability to seek care or maintain treatment. These issues may affect one’s income, housing, access to family, or ability to travel for medical care. To help patients overcome these issues and maintain care, medical-legal partnerships (or MLPs) are formed to connect patients with legal representation to reduce legal burdens and allow patients to focus on their health.

 

Cooper’s Center for Healing is engaged in an MLP with the Camden Coalition, a nonprofit in Camden dedicated to improving care for those with complex health conditions and social needs. Through this MLP, attorneys within the Camden Coalition represent patients receiving treatment for use disorder from the Center for Healing in their various legal needs, breaking down hurdles that may stand in the way of their care.

 

Traditionally, medical-legal partnerships connect patients with legal representation to assist with civil matters. These attorneys help patients in engagements with landlords or housing programs, custody matters, or helping patients navigate the web of social benefits that may be available to them.

 

A notable aspect of the MLP between Cooper’s Center for Healing and the Camden Coalition is the inclusion of criminal legal services to those provided by Coalition attorneys. MLPs typically provide only civil legal service to patients, but as noted in an article published by the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics in 2024, those administering this MLP saw a distinct need for criminal legal services as well.

 

Criminal representation was mostly utilized by patients dealing with drug-related charges, or charges for municipal crimes associated with active addiction, such as shoplifting or other so-called petty crimes. For more serious or violent crimes, the MLP recommends the patient retain the services of the public defender.

 

One year in, these criminal matters were the primary reason a patient relied on the MLP for legal representation. Authors of the 2024 article say that the combination of addiction medicine and legal representation provides a powerful story for patients in the criminal court.

 

The National Center for Medical Legal Partnerships has created a toolkit for organizations interested in forming their own MLPs.