By Amy Copperman, Legal Key Executive Director
October 28, 2025
It’s conference season, and Legal Key has been busy attending conferences, meetings and gatherings of all shapes and sizes recently. It’s been great to connect with others around the country who are thinking creatively and purposely about addressing health-harming legal needs.
Earlier this month I attended the Camden Coalition’s Putting Care at the Center 2025 conference in Portland, OR. This annual conference brings together a wide range of stakeholders in the complex care field, and this year it also included a medical-legal partnership track co-created with the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership. It was a great chance to step out of the daily work and connect with hundreds of MLP practitioners.
In Portland I also had the opportunity to give a 2-minute “Buzz,” a short, TED talk-like presentation meant to share a novel idea and spark curiosity. Preparing for the Buzz challenged me to think hard about how Legal Key innovates.
One of the motivators for the Legal Key model is that, unlike the guarantee to an attorney in criminal cases, there aren’t nearly enough lawyers to help low-income Americans address their civil legal problems. Over 90% of identified civil legal needs do not get addressed adequately, which means we are far from a world where everyone has a lawyer to represent them. But I wonder whether the “gold standard” of having an attorney for every situation is what we should be striving for anyway? Attorneys are crisis responders, not preventative problem-solvers.
The crux of my talk was this: “We are all familiar with primary medical care. What if we create a primary legal care system?” As I said those words out loud, people responded with murmurs of recognition and nodding of heads. It was an “aha” moment for the audience, which reflected my own growing understanding that we have to stop centering lawyers as the solution for all legal needs.
What would primary legal care look like? It would change both WHO is doing the legal problem-solving and WHEN that problem-solving happens. For example:
- There would be broad access to clear information about legal rights and remedies.
- Lots of people would be empowered to spot legal problems without needing to call a lawyer.
- People who are not attorneys could act on legal information.
- Lawyers would be brought in only if a legal problem couldn’t be addressed preventatively.
Primary legal care may be a moonshot kind of idea, but we need bold action right now. With legal needs on the rise, and traditional systems of legal representation being threatened, there has never been a more critical time to activate people who are not attorneys to take action and tackle legal roadblocks in an integrated and preventative way.
