LSC Spotlight on Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County: Legal Aid for Your Health

By Shelly Skinner

Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County (NLSLA) is a non-profit organization that provides free legal assistance to low-income people. NLSLA handles a wide range of civil matters, including domestic violence, housing, unemployment benefits, and expungement of criminal records. Additionally, NLSLA has provided legal services through medical-legal partnerships for over a decade.

Medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) integrate lawyers into healthcare settings, allowing patients to receive legal services that improve their health outcomes. For example, a lawyer may help a patient suffering from asthma complications by taking legal action so that their landlord provides mold mitigation, which can improve the patient’s health. A lawyer may also help patients who have failed to make utility payments due to diminishing capacity avoid utility shut-off, protecting them from health-harming conditions and homelessness. MLPs operate in 450 healthcare organizations in 49 states and the District of Columbia.

NLSLA refers to its MLPs as “medical-legal community partnerships” to emphasize its goal of building relationships not only between medical and legal practitioners but also with the community. These partnerships are located at hospitals and clinics throughout Los Angeles County, where attorneys work to resolve legal barriers that impact patients’ health.

Gerson Sorto, NLSLA’s Director of Legal Services, says a prime example of their program’s work involves a case where an individual was hospitalized with multiple gunshot wounds that left him disabled and in need of particularized equipment, including a special bed, catheters, and pain medications. After being discharged from the hospital, he was sent to a rehabilitation facility, which later evicted him without following the proper procedures to do so, leaving the patient without access to the specific equipment required for his healthcare needs. NLSLA’s medical-legal community partnership helped him find a new place to live and obtain specialized equipment. Additionally, NLSLA’s work on the case led to the rehabilitation center being cited and fined, and it has since implemented a corrective action plan to protect future patients.

With each client’s informed consent, this collaboration leads to a more holistic diagnosis and treatment plan.

NLSLA has also performed critical work for cancer patients, who often endure difficult treatments, including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, which can lead to infertility. NLSLA’s work in this area has helped provide patients access to fertility preservation treatments covered by their health plans.

NLSLA has also partnered with Kaiser Permanente to provide housing-related legal services to its patients. The partnership has resulted in vulnerable individuals receiving legal services and increased job satisfaction for Kaiser Permanente’s patient-facing employees.

Indeed, although some healthcare providers can be hesitant about working with lawyers, once they understand what MLPs do, they become not just comfortable but genuinely excited about the potential for MLPs to help their patients. They refer more patients to MLPs, which leads to more patients receiving legal help and better health outcomes.

The numbers serve as evidence of the success of NLSLA’s medical-legal community partnership program. Since it started in 2018, it has opened 18,000 cases and trained over 3,500 individuals.

Internally, NLSLA’s medical, legal community partnership staff comprises lawyers, paralegals, and social workers who actively engage with their clients’ healthcare teams to learn about their medical care and needs. With each client’s informed consent, this collaboration leads to a more holistic diagnosis and treatment plan. To serve vulnerable individuals further, NLSLA’s Sorto hopes that his team can incorporate a data scientist who could help enhance their legal deliverables to clients, further improve patient outcomes, and lead to even more efficiency for healthcare teams.

Sorto notes that MLP attorneys must operate at the top of their license because they provide counsel on a wide range of legal issues, conduct outreach with patients, healthcare providers, and the community, and keep up-to-date on relevant policy matters for their clientele. MLP attorneys accomplish all this while facing limited resources.

Like many MLPs, NLSLA relies on grants and fundraising to provide valuable services to patients and support to healthcare workers. NLSLA also receives funding from Legal Services Corporation, the nation’s single largest funder of civil legal aid for low-income Americans. As the justice gap continues to grow, the need for medical-legal partnerships becomes of greater importance. More information about Legal Services Corporation’s support of medical-legal partnerships can be found here and here.

Shelly Skinner worked on labor law cases and ethics matters as a Federal Attorney for 12 years. She is a member of LSC’s Leaders Council and is working on innovative solutions to increase access to justice.