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Pro Bono Work Can Also Be Good For Business, Bill Waddell Says

4 min read

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 Eldridge & 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.

Long-term Relationships
But Waddell’s involvement in the clinic since 2012 wasn’t prompted by business concerns. He sees it as an atypical pro bono experience.

Usual pro bono work is performed on a one-time basis, case by case, Waddell said. But “a lot of people crave this ongoing relationship where you can really help people in their lives.” At the clinic, he gets to know clients and their families and forms long-term relationships.

“When you leave after the end of the day, you think, ‘I really was a lawyer today. I really did something to help somebody.’ There’s something huge about that,” Waddell said. “I’ve always felt this calling to do this kind of thing, and so I do it.”

Winning a battle with prostate cancer was also a motivator, Waddell said. He called that experience a wake-up call that made him rethink what really matters, and what really matters to him is helping other people.

He spends at least one day a month at the clinic and another one or two days doing related work like attending hearings or completing paperwork.

Waddell first heard about the clinic from Kevin De Liban of Legal Aid of Arkansas.

De Liban helped establish the medical-legal partnership and said Waddell was eager to join in, calling once a month for 10 months before it launched.

Pro bono lawyers like Waddell bring experience and skills to the table that Legal Aid attorneys, with their limited resources, can’t, De Liban said. Legal Aid has just one attorney for every 18,000 financially eligible Arkansans.

Legal Aid of Arkansas is funded by the Arkansas Access to Justice Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the Arkansas Access to Justice Commission. Arkansas Access for Justice also helped Waddell publish a children’s book to raise awareness of the need for more access to legal services.

Amy Johnson, executive director of Arkansas Access, said Waddell sees his pro bono work as a way of healing society.

Judge Raymond Abramson of the Arkansas Court of Appeals, who practiced law in Clarendon for 35 years and served as chairman of the clinic’s board, said Waddell is an exceptional asset not only because he’s an excellent lawyer but also because he’s from West Helena, about 43 miles from Clarendon.

“Bill understood the culture of the Arkansas Delta, and that enabled him to have a leg up on having a relationship with these patients, because he understood from his own background,” Abramson said.

“He has a very open, honest and friendly, non-arrogant sort of personality, so that people are willing to share with him and be open with him.”

(Related: New Partnership in Delta to Focus on Kids in Need)

Wide Variety of Issues
The medical-legal partnership was forged after doctors at the clinic recognized that some patients had legal problems aggravating their medical problems. Asthmatic kids were living in moldy apartments; women kept returning with wounds because they saw no way to leave abusive partners. Patients needed psychiatric commitments, were victims of fraud, and even needed financial advice for paying the taxes on inherited property.

Waddell was often moved by grandparents — even great-grandparents — seeking guardianship of children of drug addicts, and he said he’s inspired by what they are willing and able to do with a modest amount of legal assistance.

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