Georgetown Medical Student Trades Scrubs For Suit in Medical-Legal Partnership

(January 16, 2026) - For most fourth-year medical students, a clinical rotation involves hospital rounds, surgical theaters, and diagnostic charts. But for Scott Nichols (M'26), one recent rotation looked very different: it involved sitting in the back of a D.C. Superior Court hearing, drafting letters to the Social Security Administration, and visiting patients to help fill out living wills.

Nichols is one of a select group of medical students participating in the Cancer Legal Assistance and Wellbeing (LAW) Project, a specialized endeavor of the Health Justice Alliance (HJA), an academic medical-legal partnership (MLP) between Georgetown's Law and Medical centers and its clinical partner, MedStar Health. Fourth-year medical students have the opportunity to work alongside attorneys representing cancer patients on legal issues affecting their health. The project, which began in 2019 and is supported by The Ralph Lauren Corporate Foundation, embeds attorneys at MedStar Washington Hospital Center's cancer clinic and treats issues, such as a patient facing eviction, as both a legal and medical concern.

Medical students like Nichols spend 40 hours a week during their monthlong rotation shadowing attorneys. "Our medical education emphasizes cura personalis, and to me this has always meant that my role as a doctor should extend into the community with advocacy," said Nichols. "I feel fortunate to have Cancer LAW as a rotation because most medical schools don't have an MLP and this opportunity to learn firsthand how to better support vulnerable patients."

Each year, a number of fourth year medical students on the Health Justice Scholars Track have the opportunity to participate in the Cancer LAW rotation, where they help translate medical records and spot nuances a legal eye might miss. "A doctor might write 'patient improved' in a chart because a tumor shrank by a millimeter, or their range of motion increased. To a disability plan or a Social Security judge, it could appear that the patient is better, and therefore not disabled," said Allison Dowling, JD, MLP Director of Cancer LAW. "The medical students can help attorneys better explain that 'improved' is relative and assist in demonstrating that the patient is still profoundly disabled, ultimately helping secure patient benefits."

Identifying Barriers to Care

For Nichols, the choice to join the Cancer LAW rotation was rooted in previous work in seminars as a Health Justice Scholar and in a conversation he had with a young mother living with sickle cell anemia during a previous rotation at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. She spoke to him for nearly an hour about the exhaustion of navigating a system that felt designed to overlook her.

"I felt a mix of frustration, embarrassment and responsibility from our conversation," said Nichols. "It reinforced my belief that caring for patients requires far more than prescribing medications. Physicians should understand the structural and institutional barriers that dictate who gets care, who gets ignored, and who never gets a fair shot at getting better."

Walking into the Cancer LAW office at Georgetown Law, with the U.S. Capitol just blocks away, Nichols found himself surrounded by federal buildings where decisions are made every day that shape his patients' lives, such as eligibility for Medicaid and Social Security benefits.

The rotation offers deep insight for future physicians regarding the administrative hurdles that patients face. Nichols witnessed firsthand how the Social Security Administration would deny claims over tiny errors or claim documents were missing when they had already been submitted.

Over the month, Nichols saw the wide range of legal issues Cancer LAW addresses for patients, from troubleshooting SNAP (food stamp) benefit denials, securing emergency rental assistance funding, and even witnessing how an ongoing domestic violence case impacted care. "These were issues that no medication could fix," said Nichols. "Yet they mattered just as much for someone's health and their ability to focus on getting better instead of fighting for basic needs."

Understanding the Lived Reality of Cancer Patients

For one patient, Nichols helped draft a Terminal Illness Expedited Request, a document used to expedite Social Security Disability Insurance cases for terminally ill patients. The process of writing the letter for a patient with stage IV chronic lymphocytic leukemia was eye-opening for Nichols.

"Writing about his ability to perform basic activities of daily living forced me to imagine myself in his shoes, needing help to get dressed, struggling to make food, and being too tired to complete even the simplest tasks," Nichols said. "It was emotionally hard in a way I didn't expect, and it made the barriers he faced painfully real."

The economic difficulty, as well as the physical and mental toll of cancer treatments, became tangible for Nichols during his rotation. "I had a moment where I was turned away from a government building by security because I didn't have my ID," Nichols said. "I can't help but imagine what this would be like for a patient, working paycheck to paycheck, squeezing in a rushed trip across town during a lunch break, just to be turned away at the door."

As the program continues, one takeaway for medical students like Nichols is that sometimes the most potent tool for a patient isn't a prescription, but rather a partnership with an attorney.

"Cancer LAW showed me what a healthcare team can look like when multidisciplinary teams of lawyers, physicians and social workers work together for a shared purpose," said Nichols. "I hope that in the future I can practice in a healthcare system that includes partnerships like this."

Heather Wilpone-Welborn
GUMC Communications

Cancer LAW by the Numbers

(July 2024-June 2025)