Client Feedback

From Surveys 2019-2020

Open Door Legal conducted a survey of all our clients from the past year to get feedback on how we can work to better serve our community. We would like to share with you the results of our survey and our plans to improve for the year ahead.
They are very open to helping no matter what.
Submitted 4-18-20

Open Door represents their clients with expertise and attention to detail that exceeds that of lawyers I went broke trying to pay out of pocket. Beyond that, the attorneys and staff are kind, thoughtful, and honest.
Submitted 1-4-20

The lawyers working my cases were very attentive and asked all the necessary questions needed to help me. They also explained everything to me when I needed them to.
Submitted 5-4-20

%

of clients report that we made a large or extreme difference in their lives

  • Extreme 37.97% 37.97%
  • Large 37.13% 37.13%
  • Moderate 9.28% 9.28%
  • Other 15.62% 15.62%
Open Door Legal takes the time to hear you out and work with you in the best
way they can. I feel they’re very authentic when it comes to helping people.
Submitted 5-9-20

They helped me with a divorce, which came out quick, with my immigration case, helping my friend legally with a car accident. They do everything they advertise
Submitted 8-14-19

My lawyer did a great job supporting me and making me feel like I can trust her
Submitted 8-14-19

%

of clients report that staff always treated them with respect
  • Always 86.5% 86.5%
  • Mostly 7.17% 7.17%
  • Other 6.33% 6.33%
Feedback from this year on what we can do better:
ODL should be more known to the community

Submitted 8-5-20

Offer more appointments, sometimes its a long wait

Submitted 8-5-20

A little more follow-up with the client and continue to monitor my situation

Submitted 3-13-20

Some planned actions for the coming year to respond to this feedback include:

We plan to devote more time to community outreach activities, especially building partnership relationships with community organizations, as well as being more present at local community meetings.
We will also closely monitor wait times for different areas of law and, if funding permits, hire additional program staff to open up additional appointment slots and ultimately decrease wait times.
We will work with team leads to create communication guidance regarding how often clients need to be contacted at different case stages and effectively enforce this guidance.
Increase Outreach & Community Visibility
We plan to devote more time to community outreach activities, especially building partnership relationships with community organizations, as well as being more present at local community meetings.
Decrease Wait Times
We will also closely monitor wait times for different areas of law and, if funding permits, hire additional program staff to open up additional appointment slots and ultimately decrease wait times.
Increase Client Communications
We will work with team leads to create communication guidance regarding how often clients need to be contacted at different case stages and effectively enforce this guidance.

The above are anonymous quotes and aggregated data from our July 2019- June 2020 client feedback submissions. Feedback is collected via text message automatically during the case lifecycle and by volunteers every summer. Over 300 submissions were collected. Program staff do not have access to individual responses

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.