Q&A with Melissa Rodgers

Melissa Rodgers, Esq.

Title:  Co-Founder
Organization:  Peninsula Family Advocacy Program
Years in Legal Practice: 12
MLP Affiliation:  Peninsula Family Advocacy Program
How Were You Introduced to MLP?  The precursor to the Peninsula FAP was the Preemie Project and that was our local idea in San Mateo - the brainchild of colleagues at Lucile Packard (Ann DeBattista) and me. That was our own MLP focused on preemies. We then heard about a conference in Boston and went together and that gave me the idea of expanding the concept.  Then I met Dr. Dana Weintraub who was on a similar mission.

Q: What prompted you and your colleagues to start teaching combined classes for law students and medical students?

A: Like all medical-legal partnerships, the Peninsula Family Advocacy Program was training health care providers.  We were going into hospitals and clinics and training doctors and other providers, and because we were at an academic medical center, we also started training residents. We were even doing one-on-one trainings with residents in their first year of residency.

We were also reporting on this to our advisory board. The chief of pediatrics for Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital said: “It’s great training doctors, but you really need to get medical students and law students in a room together. You need to start earlier.”

That really resonated with me and with my colleague Dr. Dana Weintraub. “Why not start earlier?” we thought. “Why wait until people are practicing to start talking about collaborating?”

Q: What types of experiences do law students and medical students taking the courses have outside of the classroom?

A: Both classes, the one at Berkley and the one at Stanford, have had a field work component to them.  At Stanford it was called a service-learning component, and at Berkley it was called a practicum.

At Stanford, the service-learning component revolved around interaction with clients. We were very keen on having law students and medical students have side-by-side experiences on every aspect of the class, not just sitting in class together but also doing legal intake interviews together and then presenting the cases to the rest of the class. We had medical-legal discussions on the cases, meaning that we were spotting legal issues but we were also spotting issues that medical professionals could address and designing case plans and then having the students go forward and work on the case.

We also had the students work on policy projects. One student decided to get involved with a community group in East Palo Alto that had been advocating for a while for closure of a waste processing plant that was an environmental hazard to the community. The community group took the lead on the issue, but the student provided support.

Another group of students got involved in the school lunch program in East Palo Alto and were trying to get the school district to shift to a healthier provider of school lunches, so that students could have access to better-tasting and healthier school lunches.

At Berkley, we placed medical-legal teams with community-based organizations that were doing ongoing important policy work. One team of students drafted a model municipal ordinance for a city that wanted to reduce fuel emissions. It was a medical student and a law student working together, and they used the medical student’s expertise to get at some of the health impact data of toxins in the air, and they used the law student’s expertise to think about which elements of federal and state law needed to be incorporated into the draft of the ordinance.

Q: Why is teaching students about medical-legal partnership important to you?

A: What motivates me in my work is getting students excited about doing work that benefits low-income communities. There is a dearth of people working in low-income communities. That doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of people working in low income communities, it’s just that the need is greater than the resources. I want students to feel that there are things that they can do and that they would enjoy doing in their careers that will make a difference in the lives of people who don’t have enough to eat, don’t have a place to live, don’t have adequate medical care or have other issues going on.

My sense is that this type of class, for some students at least, either reinforces their desire to do that work or opens avenues for them to do it as part of a career that might not be focused exclusively on low-income people.