The Law Belongs to All of Us

We’re an award-winning nonprofit working to show that poverty will be dramatically reduced when everyone has access to the law.
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We just launched a Coronavirus Legal Resource Guide to help you navigate any legal issues that may have arisen due to COVID-19.

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We’re pioneering the country’s first system of universal access to legal help.

Universal Access
Everyone with a real need gets effective help. We’ve represented clients in more than 35 areas of law and won the vast majority of our cases.

– Learn About Our Model

Claudia almost lost her home and her children.

She tried to find help but was denied multiple times. We started Open Door Legal so that women like Claudia would never need to face these battles alone.

Hear her story.

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Social Return on Investment
We track outcome data for every person we help, and our research shows that for every dollar we spent, we generated about $6.63 in financial benefits for our clients and deterred up to $14.75 in bad conduct targeting marginalized communities.

– See Our Impact Metrics

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CITATIONS

1. American University, Key Studies and Data About How Legal Aid Improves Housing Outcomes https://www.american.edu/spa/jpo/toolkit/upload/housing-7-30-19.pdf

2. George Washington Law School, In Pursuit of Justice? Case Outcomes and the Delivery of Unbundled Legal Services https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi

Ever since childhood, our co-founder Adrian has been dedicated to reducing poverty.

He studied systemic poverty in college and went to work in the field for a few years. Eventually, he had a thesis that legal aid was the most cost-effective way to address poverty in America. He wrote up a business plan and used it to apply to law school. 

The idea was to create the country’s first system of universal access to civil legal representation that ensures everyone can obtain timely, competent legal help for any legal issue, regardless of ability to pay. That had never been done before in the history of the United States.

In law school, he met Virginia, our Programs Director. Together, they co-founded the organization, two weeks after Adrian passed the bar.

When we opened we put a sign in the window, and with just that marketing and almost no other outreach we were overwhelmed with requests for help from people with good cases who had been turned away everywhere else.

Our first year we had revenue of $35,000. We would hand shred documents because a shredder was too expensive. Despite the financial challenges, we were able to work on over 280 cases in everything from housing law to family law to consumer law in the first year alone.

The hours were extreme, the pay was low, and the learning curve was steep. Still, we persisted. We knew that almost everyone we helped was not able to receive services anywhere else. Eventually, we attracted the interest of funders. We tripled our revenue for several years in a row. In 2015, we won the Bay Area Google Impact Challenge, which enabled us to expand even more. In 2019, we secured additional funding from the city that allowed us to open two new centers in the Excelsior and Western Addition.

As of 2020, our staff has grown to 27 full-time employees. We’ve shown that universal access is possible. Now, we plan to scale city-wide, make San Francisco the first city in the country’s history to have universal access to legal help, and become a model for national replication.