About Us

What is MLP?

Medical-legal partnership aims to improve the health and well-being of vulnerable individuals, children and families by integrating legal assistance into the medical setting. MLPs address social determinants of health and seek to eliminate barriers to healthcare in order to help vulnerable populations meet their basic needs and stay healthy.

MLP | Boston’s History

The Medical-legal Partnership | Boston was founded at Boston City Hospital (later renamed Boston Medical Center (BMC)), New England’s largest safety net hospital, by Dr. Barry Zuckerman, BMC’s Chief of Pediatrics. Frustrated at seeing his young patients fail to make clinical progress due to the adverse effects of social determinants of health (such as substandard housing and food insecurity), Dr. Zuckerman hired a part-time attorney to work on addressing his patients’ unmet needs for adequate housing, food, safety, and access to services.

What began with a single, part-time founding attorney (initially known as the Family Advocacy Program) evolved over the next twelve years into a robust team of lawyers, paralegals, and pediatricans; by 2005, the team was serving hundreds of patient-families annually at BMC as well as at three affiliated community health centers. In addition, by that time, in the wake of a 2001 New York Times article about the program, then-Executive Director Ellen Lawton and then-Medical Director Lauren Smith were providing informal technical assistance to scores of health care institutions and legal aid programs around the country who wanted medical-legal partnership in their communities. In early 2006, in recognition of medical-legal partnership’s strength and potential to transform the delivery of health care to vulnerable patient populations, the Kellogg and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations invested in a newly formalized national arm of the Medical-Legal Partnership for Children (MLPC), making possible a critical infrastructure to support cultivation of the model beyond Boston and outside of Pediatrics. MLPC’s local program continued to grow primarily through the support of generous Massachusetts-based funders, and by the end of 2008, the program was comprised of a legal staff of ten, along with consulting pediatricians and researchers.

In January 2009, in recognition of:

• the dramatic and fast-paced evolution of the medical-legal partnership landscape,
• the need to better distinguish the mission and activities of the national program, local program, and national network, and
• the reach of medical-legal partnership into vulnerable adult populations,

the Medical-Legal Partnership for Children was bifurcated into two newly-named programs: the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership (NCMLP) and the Medical-Legal Partnership | Boston (MLP | Boston). Both are distinct Special Programs within BMC’s Department of Pediatrics.

MLP | Boston is the Founding Site of the MLP National Network, and is thrilled to be part of a growing community of medical-legal partnerships serving patients in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. We now serve a growing number of departments at Boston Medical Center, as well as six affiliated community health centers.

Additional Information about MLP | Boston:

Mission Statement
Who We Are
Staff
FAQs