Client Feedback

From Surveys 2020 – 2021 

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 genuinely hear you out, they are knowledgeable, experienced, and willing to fight for your cause and justice! I had a knot in my stomach until I left their office. Thank God for Open Door Legal!

Submitted 12-19-2020

The lawyers take the time to explain legal situations in ways that were easy for me to understand.

Submitted 7-19-2021

Open Door Legal puts heart into their work and are really dedicated to their clients.

Submitted 7-6-2021

%

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

  • Extreme 38.11% 38.11%
  • Large 34.97% 34.97%
  • Moderate 18.53% 18.53%
  • Other 8.40% 8.40%

Open Door Legal is reliable, professional, trustworthy, stayed on top of everything.

Submitted 7-20-2021

Very professional throughout the process and we felt our lawyer went above and beyond to make us feel supported and well informed on what was going on.

Submitted 9-14-2020

They work hard at offering their clients support with care and diligence.

Submitted 8-12-2020

%

of clients report that staff always treated them with respect
  • Always 89.51% 89.51%
  • Mostly 8.04% 8.04%
  • Sometimes 1.40% 1.40%
  • Never 1.05% 1.05%
Feedback from this year on what we can do better:

Spread more awareness of the amazing services they offer.

Submitted 7-12-2021

Have more Spanish-speaking staff.

Submitted 7-7-2021

I had trouble with the online form, the website kept making me redo it

Submitted 7-12-2021

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

We plan to increase in-person flyering (when safe to do so) and to continue to strengthen our partnerships with local community groups.

We are in the process of hiring more Spanish-speaking frontline and paralegal staff. We will continue to look for Spanish-speaking attorneys. This year we have implemented a pay incentive for all staff who specifically improve the quality and capacity of our Spanish language access. 

We are currently working on some short-term solutions but hope to have a new form in early 2022.

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 August 1, 2020- July 31, 2021 client feedback submissions. Feedback is collected via text message automatically during the case lifecycle and by volunteers every summer. Over 280 submissions were collected. Program staff do not have access to individual responses.

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Please make checks payable to Open Door Legal and mail them to:

Open Door Legal
60 Ocean Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94112

We also accept donations via:

Cryptocurrency

Donor-Advised Fund

Stock

You can view all of the ways to give at https://opendoorlegal.org/donation-information. 

Please contact laurat@opendoorlegal.org if you have any questions or need any additional information.  Thank you so much for the support!

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.

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