When Little Rock attorney Bill Waddell found himself in the national spotlight in August, he embraced it to spread the word on the first rural legal-medical partnership in Arkansas.
Excerpt from "Pro Bono Work Can Also Be Good For Business"
When Little Rock attorney Bill Waddell found himself in the national spotlight in August, he embraced it to spread the word on the first rural legal-medical partnership in Arkansas.
Waddell’s pro bono work with Mid-Delta Health Systems in Clarendon (Monroe County) caught the American Bar Association’s eye, and he received one of five 2017 Pro Bono Publico Awards. The clinic, a Legal Aid of Arkansas project, connects low-income families to low-cost or free medical care and legal services.
Waddell is a partner at Friday Eldredge & Clark in Little Rock, heading its commercial litigation and regulation group. The firm supported his work by joining the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership.
Others at the firm do free work for the clinic, but most of it falls to Waddell and Harry Light, who handles bankruptcy and commercial litigation.
The lawyers’ paying clients are businesspeople, but they benefit from what’s happening at the clinic, Waddell said. In fact, giving needy people access to legal services does not lead to more suits against companies, as some have assumed, he said.
“Poverty is cruel, and we say to our business clients that these are people that are, a lot of the time, the consumers of your services or products. They are jurors in the court system. And they sometimes are your own employees,” Waddell said.
Workers with unmet medical needs are less productive.
Supporting programs like the medical-legal partnership also builds goodwill for companies, he said, and that pays off when a company seeks a bond issue facing a public vote, for example. The people served by Mid-Delta Health Systems’ clinic are also voters.
Tyson Foods Inc. of Springdale and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. of Bentonville have sponsored and provided volunteers for other medical-legal partnerships in the state, Waddell said. He hopes to see more of that.
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Bill is a partner in the firm and head of the commercial litigation and regulation group.
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