An Innovative Approach to Medical-Legal Partnership: Unauthorized Practice of Law Reform as a Civil Justice Pathway in Patient Care

Abstract

This Article discusses the design of an innovative approach to the traditional medical-legal partnership. This potentially transformative service model proposes the use of unauthorized practice of law (UPL) reform to embed civil legal problem solving within a patient care setting. Unlike in the traditional medical-legal partnership — a service model which embeds lawyers within patient care settings to address patients’ justice needs — we explore the promise of patient advocacy through community-based justice workers (CBJWs): members of the community who are not lawyers but who have specialized legal training and authorization to provide civil legal help to those who need it most. This work is the result of a partnership between Innovation for Justice, a social justice legal innovation lab housed at both the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law and the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business, and University of Utah Health. The present framework for UPL-reform-based medical-legal partnerships was developed through robust community-engaged research and design work across the 2022–23 academic year. This article discusses the research findings and proposes a framework for replication in other jurisdictions.