Adrian Tirtanadi on Open Door Legal

Open Door Legal (ODL), is an award-winning nonprofit pioneering the country’s first system of universal access to legal care right here in San Francisco. Over the last decade we’ve been growing across the city, included here in the Western Addition, and have achieved some remarkable outcomes. We believe that injustice is the heart of poverty, and we like to imagine a more just society is possible.

What would our city be like if we substantially ended domestic violence, wage theft, wrongful foreclosures, and all forms of illegal expropriation? The United States ranks as the absolute worst high-income country in access to civil justice. As a result, it is incredibly difficult for low-income people to enforce their family, contract, property, and other civil rights. This leads to many billions of dollars in value and earnings potentially illegally expropriated from our most vulnerable neighbors every year. The most cost-effective way to deter these bad actors is through the creation of a system of universal access to civil legal representation. In fact, universal access is the most cost-effective way overall to address poverty and can save the city up to $4 dollars on emergency services for every $1 dollar spent on its implementation. We imagine that Open Door Legal operates as an entity akin to a ‘general hospital’ in such a system, focusing on building a layer of triage and general practice.

Adrian Tirtanadi was inspired from an early age to think systemically about poverty and was moved to find solutions. This calling eventually led him to conclude that universal access to legal help was the most effective way of addressing poverty in America and brought him to law school. Immediately after graduating, he founded Open Door Legal, which has grown almost 200x in 10 years. In that time, ODL has secured over 50 million of dollars in assets for low-income communities of color, and has done it with employee satisfaction rates in the top 5% of all US workplaces. Adrian is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Maryland.

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