Recommended: Health Law course
Clinical Placement: Health, Law, Innovation, and Policy Lab (HLIP Lab), Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute (LTRI), Sinai Health System (Sinai Health)
About the HLIP Lab: The HLIP Lab facilitates clinical and bench research conducted at LTRI and Sinai Health and provides health law thought leadership and knowledge dissemination through legal research and writing on timely, quickly evolving, and multidisciplinary health law topics. The HLIP Lab explores the intersection of law, medicine, science, and research through special projects requiring collaboration and contract negotiations with government, non-profit entities, industry, and international consortia. In partnership with patients and research participants, clients, and community stakeholders, the HLIP Lab engages in health innovation initiatives; health equity and policy critiques; health systems improvement discourse resulting in new processes, policies, and best practices; and medical legal publications.
Learning objectives:
The goal of the externship is to provide students with both hands-on experience working on legal issues that arise in research (clinical and bench), quality improvement, technology transfer, innovation models, entrepreneurship, and commercialization in hospitals, research institutes, and academic healthcare settings; as well as participating in legal scholarship on health law, policy, advocacy, administration, and systems planning and improvement. Students will develop skills such as due diligence and factual investigation; issue spotting; contextualized problem solving; legal analysis and reasoning; legal research and writing; critical reflection on systemic impacts of law; identification and discussion of ethical issues that arise in practice (e.g., ethical use of innovative and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and digital health); oral and written communications; professional responsibilities such as organizing, prioritizing, and handling file assignments and managing client expectations. By the end of the externship, students will be able to integrate their theoretical and practical learning.
Placement activities:
Students will attend onsite at Mount Sinai Hospital or work remotely one afternoon per week (either Tuesdays or Wednesdays from 1-5 pm) to support the activities of the HLIP Lab and meet with the field supervisor. Approximately 50% of the student’s time will be spent on HLIP Lab clinical legal education activities in relation to public service and transactional work. This includes, but is not limited to, participating in operational, business, client, collaborating organizations, and other stakeholder meetings; conducting focused legal research and strategic analysis; conducting environmental scans; drafting briefing notes for decision-making, legal memoranda, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and policies; contract drafting and negotiations (written and oral) to facilitate LTRI research and special projects (e.g., non-disclosure/confidentiality agreements, data transfer agreements, material transfer agreements, clinical trial agreements, collaboration agreements, data registry agreements, biobank agreements, consortium agreements). Approximately 50% of the students’ time will be dedicated to legal research and writing related to systemic knowledge translation for publication. These efforts will contribute to several medical legal textbooks and textbook updates authored by the field supervisor and ongoing manuscript submissions to journals. Students will be acknowledged for their contribution.
Students will be exposed to fundamental aspects of substantive and procedural law applied in daily practice including government and industry collaborations (e.g., pharmaceutical, medical device, digital health, and technology companies). Students will learn about the roles of institutional, governance, and regulatory structures and agencies (e.g., Health Canada and Research Ethics Boards) and work collaboratively with legal professionals, health professionals, and academic researchers on multi-disciplinary initiatives.
Enrolment:
The HLIP Lab placement requires an application. Send a 1-2 page letter of interest and curriculum vitae to sara.faherty@utoronto.ca by the course selection deadline.
