I doubt that a week goes by that I don’t think of the line from one of Shakespeare’s least memorable characters, Dick the butcher in Henry VI (Part 2).

It was Dick who said, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

While this rarely happens, it’s nice to see when legal greed gets its comeuppance as it did recently when a patent troll not only lost their case, but the judge shifted the cost to the plaintiff.

Lawyers can do a lot of good, too, especially when used creatively, the way Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center does.

In 2008, the hospital and the Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati set up a medical-legal partnership, the Cincinnati Child Health-Law Partnership or Child HeLP.

In 2008 the hospital identified NY Group, a landlord that owned 18 buildings and consistently refused to fix issues that were health problems.

That’s where the lawyers come in because penny-pinching landlords don’t listen to “do-gooders” like social workers.

Child HeLP lawyers went after NY Group, even suing on behalf of one disabled child, forcing the repairs to be done quickly.

But their efforts didn’t stop there.

At the same time, NY Group was walking away from the buildings — Fannie Mae foreclosed on all 19 by the end of July. Legal Aid helped tenants to organize and have a voice in the foreclosure process — among other things, they wanted to make sure that the buildings remain subsidized housing.

Ultimately that pressure resulted in widespread repairs, and helped persuade Fannie Mae to sell the buildings to Community Builders, a Boston-based nonprofit that develops and operates good low-income housing (which is maintaining the subsidies). Reconstruction is about to start.

And because the approach works so well it is spreading across the country.

Perhaps it’s time to modify Shakespeare’s words to “First, let’s kill most of the lawyers.”

Hat tip to KG Charles-Harris for alerting me to the troll story.

Image credit: Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center