By Suzi Morales
innovation
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winter 2023
Students in the Suffolk Defenders Program frequently represent indigent clients in bail hearings. Often, those student attorneys have only a few minutes to talk with clients about their backgrounds, hardly enough time to gather information to demonstrate they are not a flight risk. Often, for example, an important consideration in a bail determination is whether a doctor can report that the client was not taking necessary medication at the time of the alleged crime.
As a Suffolk Legal Innovation & Technology Lab (LIT Lab) fellow, Matthew Patalano, JD ’22, developed a solution to this problem: a secure app that makes it far easier for lawyers to collect necessary client information and send a HIPAA-compliant consent form to area medical centers. The expedited process can enable students to speak with their client’s doctors in as little as 15 minutes.
“You can go to the court and say, ‘I spoke with the doctor, he says XYZ,’ which is extremely useful,” Patalano says. Currently, the app is available only to Suffolk students, but he hopes that in the future that other attorneys will be able to use it as well.