Nonprofit Profile: Can Universal Access to the Law Address Poverty?

Adrian Tirtanadi of Open Door Legal

In seventh grade, Adrian Tirtanadi read through the World Book Encyclopedia and had a eureka moment. When looking at the income tables for various countries, he noticed some extreme disparities. 

“Comparing my parents’ income to what was in the book told me that we were extremely wealthy,” Adrian recalls. “I confronted my parents about this and said why do we have so much money and why aren’t we giving more away? They weren’t necessarily pleased with this line of questioning.”

Adrian would continue to focus on what he calls a “moral calling and responsibility.”

“By the time I went to college I had decided that the only thing that I wanted to do with my life was to address poverty in the United States,” he says. “I knew I wanted to start something, even then. I told my wife about it on our first date.”

Using legal services to address poverty
After college and a stint working at a small community development nonprofit in Maryland, Adrian realized that getting a law degree would be essential to his attack on poverty.

“So I wrote up a nice little business plan: How to create the country’s first system of universal access to justice,” he says.

The business plan helped Adrian get into the University of San Francisco School of Law, where he further refined his thesis about the causes of poverty and developed a plan to eventually open a legal clinic.

“If you look at the flaws in our system, a lot of the problems are based on inadequate legal services to the poor,” he says. “My thesis was that legal services were the most cost-effective way to address poverty and help people build assets.”

The creation of Open Door Legal
Two weeks after he got his law license, Adrian and law school friend Virginia Taylor founded Open Door Legal, a free, full service legal aid nonprofit for people with limited incomes.

“We had funding of about $35,000, basically pulled from family and friends,” Adrian says. “We couldn’t get anyone else to fund it, really. They thought it was kinda a crazy idea. I ended up going to about 300 businesses and got them to donate excess inventory; then I sold that for about $8,000, for seed capital.”

Adrian is the executive director of Open Door Legal and Virgina is the director of legal services. They opened an office on a shoestring budget in the Bayview, serving 100 clients the first year.

“There was so much latent demand for legal help that all we did was put a sign out on the street – that’s all the outreach we needed,” Adrian says. “People came in and were like, ‘I’m desperate for help. I’ve been to five places and been turned away.’”

Open Door Legal serves clients with a wide range of legal problems, including: housing issues, such as evictions, discrimination, and habitability (inadequate heating, plumbing, or electricity); family issues, including domestic violence, child custody, child support and visitation; and consumer issues, including consumer fraud and property confiscation.

All the cases are handled in civil, not criminal, courts. No fees are charged.

Last year, Open Door Legal served more than 400 Bayview clients. Today it has four storefront offices throughout San Francisco that encompass about two-thirds of the city’s low income population.

Open Door Legal comes to the Sunset
The newest location serves the Sunset.

“We have helped five to 10 families on every block in the Bayview,” Adriann  says, “and we plan to have a similar impact in the Sunset.”

The Sunset office focuses on elder abuse and immigration. It also addresses a range of family issues, such as divorce and child custody, adoption and guardianship.

Adrian says a surprising need in the Sunset is estate planning for residents who own houses purchased decades ago but now have little income.

“You wouldn’t think of that, but there’s a lot of low-income, high-asset seniors in the Sunset because they might have bought their house in the 1960s,” Adrian explains. “But they are on fixed income now, so it’s really hard for them to afford an estate plan, and it also makes them super vulnerable to predators. If they die without an estate plan, the home will get sold by the probate court, and the next of kin will not inherit it.”

Future vision
After a decade, Open Door Legal now has a $5.5 million annual budget and 47 employees, including a dozen attorneys. More than a dozen employees are Cantonese, Mandarin, and Spanish speakers.

“Our vision over the next two years is to grow to about a $10 million budget,” Adrian says. “We want to make San Francisco the first city in the country with universal access to legal representation, and then replicate this model across the country. We want to reduce poverty dramatically beyond San Francisco.”

Open Door Legal’s growth has been impressive for a small nonprofit with limited funding.

“Between our first and fifth year we tripled our budget every year, using our track record to raise money,” Adrian says. “Our first big break was [winning] the Google Impact Challenge, a half-million-dollar grant. We also started getting money from the DRK Foundation, which assists early-stage, high-growth nonprofits. After our fifth year, we began getting funding from the city.”

Open Door Legal now gets about two-thirds of its funding from the city. Adrian and Virgina say the data they’ve collected prove that their free legal services model is cost-effective.

“We estimate that for every $1 we spend we generate about $21 in assets, roughly $6 to clients and another $15 to the community,” Adrian says. “Then there is the feedback from clients. About two-thirds say we’ve made an extreme or large difference in their life. Our cost per beneficiary is around $2,200. So we’re providing an extreme life change for a small investment.”

The Open Door Legal philosophy
Underpinning the Open Door Legal philosophy is what Adrian says is the general misunderstanding Americans have about the nation’s justice system.

“Everybody knows that defendants in the U.S. criminal justice system without money are entitled to a lawyer paid for by the government,” he says. “But civil courts in the United States do not.”

What is the impact?

“Basically, that means that because poor people in the U.S. do not have money to go to court, they in effect do not have enforceable property rights, enforceable contract rights, or enforceable family rights,” Adrian explains. “So billions of dollars in assets are essentially stolen from the poor every year in this country.”

Moreover, Adrian says, “All the local, state and federal poverty-alleviation efforts are just trying to make up in some way for failing to protect poor peoples’ rights, rather than just ending the injustice itself.”

Focus on domestic violence
Domestic violence represents a major part of Open Door Legal’s caseload (See sidebar below).

“Usually, people think of domestic violence as a criminal issue – protective orders and such,” Adrian says. “This is a common misconception. Domestic violence is almost never prosecuted criminally, and research has found that criminal enforcement has almost no effect on incident rates.”

Actually, Adrian says, research has shown that legal aid, rather than criminal prosecution, is far more effective at reducing domestic violence rates and is actually the only intervention associated with a reduction in incidence rates.

“If your boyfriend or your husband is beating you up, you’re probably going to call the cops,” Adrian says. “But people misunderstand what the cops can do and what they’re useful for. They can do some investigation; they can be helpful if you need an emergency protective order; and you can use police reports in a civil action. But long term, almost none of the incidents are going to get turned into criminal cases.”

Alternatively, Adrian says, abuse victims fare better when they get a civil restraining order against the abuser because once the victim gets the protective order in civil court, she can use it to remove the spouse or partner from the home and get full custody of the children.

“Once you have full custody, you can ask for more child support, and then you can garnish the abuser’s wages,” Adrian says.

He also says research shows the civil court approach dramatically improves the earning potential of women.

“According to the Centers for Disease Control, domestic violence results in the loss of 8 million days of paid work per year by women,” Adrian says. “And using civil courts to free abuse victims from their abusers also reduces their medical debt. So it’s a huge win.” 

Adrian acknowledges the “amazing work” of other legal groups serving disadvantaged communities and Open Door Legal partners with many. 

“Our community legal offices are like community health clinics, where people can go and get sort of general practice care,” Adrian says. “And if there is a specialized problem, we will refer it to a partner organization that specializes in that issue.”

Case Study:
How Open Door Legal Helped a Domestic Violence Victim
Claudia, a working mother of two in the Bayview being abused by her partner, turned to Open Door Legal. Executive Director Adrian Tirtanadi tells Claudia’s story:

“Claudia grew up in the Bayview and married her high school sweetheart. But the relationship turned very abusive. She was assaulted twice a week for eight years. The police were called at one point, but because her husband and his family threatened her family, she decided not to pursue anything. One day her husband called the cops and said Claudia had hit him. It wasn’t true in this instance, but this is a common method of control. The cops arrested her and she spent five nights in jail. When she was released, her husband got a temporary restraining order that prevented her from going home and seeing her kids. Then he blocked her access to their bank account, and she ended up homeless. She couldn’t see her kids, couldn’t even get a change of clothes.

She had a civil trial coming up, which would determine whether or not she’d be allowed back in her home. Four agencies around the city turned her away, saying it was not the kind of issue they handled, or they were already at capacity.

Two days before her first hearing, she found us. We went to court on her behalf — and we won. That got her back in the home, got her husband out of the house and got her a divorce, even though her husband tried to hide all the community assets. She got full custody of the children, child support, and she was never hit again. She’s remained housed since then, transitioned back into the workforce, completed her citizenship, and she and her children are doing great.

All this help for Claudia cost Open Door Legal about $3,500. If she had gotten private legal help, the cost would have been prohibitive. Claudia’s is one story. There are thousands more.”

Learn more about Open Door Legal here.

Reported and written by volunteer community journalist Tom Colin. We encourage residents with journalism experience, retired journalists, and student journalists in high school and college to volunteer as writers for Supervisor Engardio’s newsletter. Interested? Apply here. Do you know a story you would like to see featured in the newsletter? Tell us about it here.

The Rest of the Story…
Read an update about Open Door Legal’s plan to reduce homelessness in half, based on an academic study about the success of their work.