The Legal Aid Society has teamed up with Shade Tree Clinic, a venture run by Vanderbilt School of Medicine students, to offer basic legal services — think Social Security issues or housing assistance — to the clinic's patients. As part of the partnership, Legal Aid attorney Chay Sengkhounmany (pictured) is spending time at eight-year-old Shade Tree three days a month.

Shade Tree is a free medical clinic that Vanderbilt medical students have run since 2004. Brad Lindell, a former Vanderbilt medical student volunteer who helped organize the MLP explained, “the idea of adding legal assistance to Shade Tree became clear once I saw the success that my wife’s law firm had with its partnership with a Boston medical clinic. Our patients face many of the same issues that she had seen in Boston. We knew that adding the legal component to our services would help make our medical treatment more successful.”