Davis Wright Tremaine Summer 2026 Research Clinic Instructions

Project Overview:

Lawyers for Good Government’s Gender Justice & Health Equity Team seeks Davis Wright Tremaine’s assistance in sourcing research on the status of telehealth laws in all 56 states and territories. The GJHE team works closely on a number of legal issues involving state telehealth laws, including state-level shield laws, equitable access to care, and the rights and risks of healthcare providers operating in differing legal environments. Telehealth laws are governed at the state level, and each state’s requirements and permissions differ in important ways. The purpose of this project will be to provide L4GG with an overview of each state’s laws, allowing us to easily analyze, compare and respond to the legal landscape. The research questions are detailed below.

ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION:

L4GG is a community of 125,000 lawyers, law students, and activists fighting to ensure equal rights, equal opportunities and equal justice under the law. We coordinate large scale pro bono programs and engage in advocacy and policy work, seeking not only to establish and enforce equality under the law, but to also create the social and economic conditions that lead to true equity.

Instructions for Participating Attorneys:

  1. Attend the Training. Training will be held on June 24 at 1 pm ET. The clinic will begin with a training by L4GG’s attorneys walking you through the context and importance of the research, as well as the research questions and methods.

  2. Review the Research Questions. We recommend that you review each of the research questions and decide on the order of your research prior to beginning. While you are researching, we recommend that you pull the questions into a separate document for your particular state/territory, so that you are able to take notes as you research

  3. Conduct Your Research.

    When starting, we recommend conducting a simple google search of your state/territory+telemedicine laws, and your state/territory+shield law and reviewing high level information to get a baseline understanding of what laws exist in your state and whether your state is a shield state. As a general rule, if you are working in a state with Republican leadership, there will likely not be any shield protections in place. 

    Review the “Supplemental Tools and Resources” section of this document for additional background materials that you can use to guide your search.

    Brainstorm terms before you begin your search. Most topics can be described in numerous ways, and not all jurisdictions will use the same terminology. Develop a list of relevant terms up front and continue to refine it as you continue your research.  

    As you are researching, please double check to ensure that a given law or regulation is presently in effect, as the legal landscape for healthcare has changed in significant ways in recent years. 

    Look for coverage from reputable secondary sources. News articles can help decipher what is happening with a given law in plain terms. 

  4. Compile Your Research. We recommend that during the legal research process, you gather your findings in a Word or Google document prior to completing the online form.

  5. Citations. Whenever discussing any laws, regulations, or cases in your responses, please provide both the Bluebook citation and link to the citation in Justia. We ask that any citations to statute are linked to Justia - if you find the citation or case in Westlaw or Lexis, please then search for it in Justia to provide a publicly available link. This allows us to easily add the research to public facing materials for our community. 

  6. Copy with Hyperlink:  Whenever possible, please copy a link directly to the relevant section of the code you’re citing.  You can do this by right clicking on text in the relevant public web page and selecting the option to “copy link to highlight,” so whoever clicks said link is brought to the exact text you highlighted, helping readers navigate text-heavy documents. 

  7. Submit Your Research.

    • Once you have completed your research, please copy and paste your findings into the corresponding fields using this online form [insert form link]. 

    • Please check your answers for accuracy before pressing “Submit.”

    • [insert instructions re: research not completed during the clinic]

Questions? Email [insert instructions].

Tools:

As you conduct your research, we recommend you consult the following resources:

  • Your Westlaw, Lexis, Bloomberg or Fastcase Account: We request that you begin all primary research in whichever subscription legal research tool you have access to and then utilize additional research tools to ensure that you are viewing the most updated version of the law. 

  • Justia: This is a publicly available resource for the state codes of each jurisdiction. However, it does not include Westlaw or Lexis’s keycite or red flags to show if there is superseding case law. If you need to cite a historical version of a state statute, please provide a Justia hyperlink citation to the most recent version of the statute or the relevant historical version of the statute as appropriate.

  • Cornell Legal Information Institute: This is a publicly available resource of state regulations, maintained by Cornell law school.

  • Your assigned state’s Department of Health (or equivalent agency): this will include additional details or regulatory requirements for telehealth in your state.

  • Telehealth.hhs.gov: This is useful for general threshold information about telehealth and familiarizing yourself with the terminology.

  • Center for Connected Health Policy: This is a key resource for telehealth information by state. You can search by either topic or state (at the top of the page), and find details about each state’s telehealth landscape. 

  • Reproductive Health Initiative for Telehealth (RHITES) Map of Telehealth Abortion laws: Although we are asking you to research more broadly than abortion-specific telehealth laws, this map will give you a good idea of what laws exist in your state and whether they are different for reproductive healthcare.   

  • Guttmacher’s research on state shield laws: this will be a great resource for determining whether you state has a shield law in place and what it covers; however, we recommend that you use it as a launching point, as many shield laws have been expanded or amended in recent months. 

RESEARCH QUESTIONS:

(PLEASE REMEMBER TO INCLUDE CITATIONS AND LINKS WHEN AVAILABLE FOR EACH OF YOUR ANSWERS)

For your assigned state, please answer the following questions:

[1] How does your state define telemedicine?

[2] Please provide a citation and public link to the law defining telemedicine.

[3] Does your state have restrictions on what kinds of care are legal through telehealth services? If yes,

[3a] Please explain what these restrictions are and what they require with respect to in-person visits before or after care, dispensing requirements for medication, and any other details.

[3b] Please provide a citation and public link to the law regarding these restrictions.

[4] What licensure requirements does your state enforce for providers of telehealth?

[5] Please provide a citation and public link to the law regarding licensure requirements enforced by the state.

[6] Does your state participate in interstate licensure agreements? If yes,

[6a] Please provide a citation and public link to the law regarding interstate licensure agreements.

[7] What does your state require with respect to Medicaid reimbursement for telehealth?

[8] Please provide a citation and public link to the law regarding Medicaid reimbursement for telehealth.

[9] Please include details about how your state covers audio, visual, and audio-visual care.

[10] Please provide a citation and public link to the law regarding how your state covers audio, visual, and audio-visual care. 

[11] Does your state’s Department of Health (or equivalent agency) include any requirements for state-level medicaid reimbursement? If yes,

[11a] Please provide a citation and public link to the law regarding such requirements.

[12] Does your state have a “shield law” in place for gender-affirming care or reproductive healthcare? If yes,

[12a] Please identify the scope of the care protected under the shield law.

[12b] Please identify whether your state’s shield law includes provisions related to telehealth, and if so, what those provisions are.

[12c] Please provide a citation and public link to the shield law.

Once you have completed your research, please submit your responses (with citations/links) using this online form [insert link]. Thank you for contributing to this important project.