Nov. 16, 2017

SOMArts Center

934 Brannan Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Doors open at 6:00pm

Sponsorship information

TICKETS ARE SOLD OUT!

We’d still love to see you there. Join the waitlist!

Join the Waitlist

Join Open Door Legal in celebrating five years of community service. Thanks to supporters like you, we’ve pioneered universal access to legal representation, starting in the southeast corner of San Francisco.

Committed to the belief that everyone deserves access to justice, our dedicated team of staff and 200+ pro-bono attorneys have tirelessly stood in the gap for our low-income neighbors, representing them in over 35 areas of law.

This year our team opened our 1000th case. Since opening, we’ve defended immigrant rights, halted evictions, accredited local businesses, prevented domestic violence and secured $820,000 in attorney’s fees. This year, we found that for every dollar we spend on legal services, we return $20 to our clients and their community.

Centered on connecting our supporters with their impact on Bayview, the evening will give your organization a chance to meet our clients, enjoy a reception with likeminded influencers, and invest a brighter future.

Last year, tickets sold out within a month. Get yours before they’re gone!

SOMArts Center

Open Door Legal’s 2017 Gala at SOMArts
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A Huge Thanks to Our 2017 Sponsors

Presenting Sponsor

 

International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers

Protector Sponsors

Community Sponsors

The Norvell Family

The Ritchie Family

Interested in becoming a sponsor? Click here to find out more information about the benefits of sponsorship.

Sponsor the Gala

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.