It's The Law

It's Acadiana: Out to Lunch

There’s a saying in show business: Every musician wants to be an actor. And every actor wants to be a musician. For a lot of people, either option would be a dream job. Especially if they grow up to be doctors or lawyers instead.

But do lawyers want to be doctors? Do doctors want to be lawyers? Maybe. Maybe not. Even if you join the bar. You can still work in health care. Just ask Jack McGee.

Jack is an attorney. He got a law degree from Tulane. But he’s not practicing law so much these days. Instead, he’s running a plastic surgery clinic. McGee Plastic Surgery is the only clinic in Lafayette headed by a double board-certified surgeon. That would be Jack’s wife, Dr. Catherine Link-McGee.

Jack runs the clinic’s business operations. And he still puts his law degree to work in contract negotiations and other office matters. And there are plenty of office matters to attend to. Unlike many plastic surgeons, the McGee’s take insurance.

The start-up challenges are daunting for starting a mom and pop surgery center, Jack says. But McGee has built a strong client base, serving 400 patients with a full-time staff of three.

There’s plenty of lawyering in health care. For a lot of folks, medical malpractice suits might come to mind. But it’s a much bigger sector in the legal industry with a range of issues to be litigated, both literally and figuratively.

Berryl Broussard is currently the in-house counsel for the Teche Action Clinic, a federally qualified health center. That essentially means it’s a special type of clinic designed to address health needs in places with few doctors and hospitals with services for uninsured and underinsured.

Teche Action offers pretty much everything a patient might need. Primary care, dental care, counseling and more. The challenge here is how to make an action clinic sustainable. By definition, they receive federal funding, but it covers just a portion of the action clinic’s operating budget.

Berryl has long career in health law and is a certified health care compliance professional. She was born and raised in Opelousas.

Right now there are around 100,000 students in law schools around the country. Each year about 30,000 of those students graduate and become lawyers. Most of these folks start out in various types of legal positions - working in a law office – but after a few years a number of them find their way into other occupations, many in business.

It’s not necessarily that they don’t like being a lawyer, it’s because unlike other post-graduate studies - which focus in on a narrow specialty – law training ranges from a broad education in federal regulation to personnel skills required for client counseling.

A law degree is kind of the Swiss Army pocketknife of post-grad education. Berryl and Jack's individual journeys after law school have taken them down a lot of interesting paths, with further directions to come.

Out to Lunch Acadiana was recorded live over lunch at Tsunami Sushi in downtown Lafayette. You can find photos from this show at itsacadiana.com.

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