Read the latest news on Open Door Legal and universal access to legal help

Open Door Legal in the news

Housing Work Inspired UC Law SF Student to Attend Law School

UC Law SF

This 61-year-old chef was facing homelessness. Now his eviction from an S.F. co-op is on hold

SF Chronicle

How one nonprofit is pioneering universal access to legal aid

Dropbox

Housing Attorney Kelsey Merrick at Western Addition Anti-Displacement Rally

Youtube

Right to Counsel for Domestic Violence Survivors

SF Standard

Got Sued for Pandemic Rent Debt? Here’s What You Need to Know

SF Public Press

S.F. Supervisor Preston wants ‘eviction free zone’ in his district

SF Chronicle

Nonprofit Open Door Legal expands HR & Finance capabilities while reducing overhead

Rippling

Right to Counsel Helps Tenants Stay in Place, But Effort Is Short on Attorneys

SF Public Press

Hundreds of SF Renters Threatened With Eviction During Pandemic

SF Public Press

Open Door Legal expands low-income legal aid to Excelsior, Western Addition

Hoodline

How Open Door Legal is Using Tech to Make Legal Aid Universally Accessible

Salesforce

Interested in an interview?

Contact Laura Turner at laurat@opendoorlegal.org to learn more about our work.

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Open Door Legal
PO Box #369
San Francisco, CA 94112

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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.

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