Hilary

Litigation Intern

To me, it’s all about using my education and experiences to make the law work for everyone. That San Francisco was and remains very segregated has always bothered me. I want to fight this and protect underserved communities. I’ve always wanted to go into social justice work, and that’s where I want to stay.

“I come from a family torn apart by civil unrest in China and Taiwan. My parents escaped this and came to the Bay Area, where I was born. I feel very lucky to have grown up here, surrounded by lots of different people from different backgrounds.

When I went to college in Hawaii, and later lived in Taiwan and South Africa, I encountered even more diversity. Living in these places opened my eyes to the challenges communities face all over the world. I became involved in activism but soon realized that being an activist wasn’t enough. I needed to understand the law. After some time working as a paralegal, I went to law school to go into social justice work.

I’m currently a litigation intern at Open Door Legal. I’m working on a case right now where our client was battered and assaulted while waiting in the car for his wife, who was buying groceries. He had done nothing wrong. The security guard assaulted him because of the way he looked and was perceived. This case stood out to me as a reminder of how unfairly law is enforced. I would never have to worry about being attacked when I shop for groceries, but this man — who is just as undeserving and innocent as me — does. That’s not okay.

To me, it’s all about using my education and experiences to make the law work for everyone. That San Francisco was and remains very segregated has always bothered me. I want to fight this and protect underserved communities. I’ve always wanted to go into social justice work, and that’s where I want to stay.”

Photography © Jona Bocari

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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.