Solomon Center Clinicians Bring Innovative Approaches to the National Stage
The attorneys who oversee the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School’s Medical-Legal Partnership (MLP) clinic discussed their work at the cutting edge of direct legal services and law teaching at two national conferences.
For more than 10 years, the Solomon Center has run an MLP in collaboration with Yale New Haven Health (YNHH) and the Yale School of Medicine. The MLP embeds poverty-focused legal services in health care settings so that attorneys and law students can meet clients where they are, in places they trust, and address the broad range of civil legal needs that act as impediments to care and improved health outcomes. The MLP currently serves more than 600 under-resourced YNHH patients and their families every year.
As the MLP has grown and clients’ needs have shifted, the attorneys who manage it — MLP Legal Director James Bhandary-Alexander, who is also a clinical lecturer in law and associate research scholar in law at Yale Law School, and MLP Legal Fellow Rachel Lerman — have refined the clinic’s legal and pedagogical methods to best serve patients while training the next generation of health care lawyers.
“The civil legal issues our client populations face are anything but static,” underscored Bhandary-Alexander. “Those issues are the product of the broader policy environment. As new federal and state policies come into place, it is important for the MLP to find creative ways to address clients’ changing needs.”
The Yale/Yale New Haven MLP’s adaptive approach and successful track record have made the Solomon Center’s attorneys sought-after speakers at conferences across the country.
In April, Lerman spoke at the 2026 MLP Conference on “Bridging Systems and Restoring Trust Through Collaboration” in Fort Worth, Texas, hosted by the Institute for Healthcare Access at Texas A&M University. She discussed the Solomon Center’s response to the recent surge in demand for immigration-related legal services across Greater New Haven. This work began with the Center playing a central role in helping immigrant families better prepare for the detention and deportation of their loved ones — which resulted in a guide published by the Governor of Connecticut last year — and has since evolved to encompass a wide range of immigration-related legal services, from consultations to know-your-rights presentations to full representation and deportation defense.
Lerman’s talk emphasized the importance of building coalitions with other community organizations serving impacted patients and their families, to ensure they receive the array of services needed to improve their wellbeing. She pointed to the MLP’s partnership with the Connecticut Immigrant Support Network and The American Immigrant Legal Clinic (TAILC) Project, a community-driven initiative supported by The Connecticut Project that connects immigrants facing detention and deportation with local lawyers and advocates. Law students, working under Lerman’s supervision, have also designed and led trainings for healthcare workers on how to improve immigrant patients’ health.
“The number of patients with immigration-related legal needs has increased at health systems across the United States,” said Lerman. “It was privilege to share what we have learned from our work here in New Haven with MLP attorneys around the nation, which we hope will help seed a new wave of MLP models in the coming months and years.”
In May, Bhandary-Alexander brought this same spirit to the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Conference on Clinical Legal Education in Portland, Oregon, where he served as chair of the interdisciplinary committee of the clinical law section. In that role, he co-organized several working group sessions focused on the present and future of MLP practice, in which clinicians from various law schools discussed the opportunities and challenges their programs face, pedagogical best practices, and novel approaches to MLP teaching. Bhandary-Alexander also separately spoke on a panel regarding the importance of interdisciplinary MLP lawyering.
Bhandary-Alexander’s most recent speaking engagement took place on June 18, when he took part in a panel hosted by the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership and the Camden Coalition titled “Organizing for Impact: Building MLP Coalitions in Challenging Times.”
About the Solomon Center
The Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School is the first of its kind to focus on the intersection of law and the governance, practice, and business of health care. The Center brings together leading experts and practitioners from the public and private sectors to address cutting-edge questions of health law and policy, and to train the next generation of top health lawyers, industry leaders, policymakers, and academics.
