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*Important Update Regarding Coronavirus (COVID-19)*

Bayview office hours: Monday-Friday, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm and 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Excelsior office hours: Monday-Friday, 10:00 am – 12:00 pm and 1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Western Addition offices hours: Monday-Friday, 10:00am – 12:30pm, 1:00 pm – 3:30 pm.

If you need information and resources if you are behind on rent or mortgage due to COVID-19, please view our Vision Zero Displacement guides:
Vision Zero Displacement • Visión Cero Desplazamiento •  視力零移位

In compliance with city reopening guidelines, all clients will be required to wear a mask in order to enter the offices. We are monitoring the situation and will continually update our social media and website with any changes. If you have any questions regarding how Coronavirus may be affecting your legal issue, please view our coronavirus resource guide.

View our Coronavirus legal resource guide • Ver nuestra guía de recursos legales de Coronavirus

Please fill out the form below or call us at (415) 735-4124.

Vision Zero Displacement Call-Back
































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

Open Door Legal
PO Box #369
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