Please Consider SELF-HELP TO hELP OTHERS

Our clinic services Alameda County, one of the largest counties in California, as well as rural counties throughout the state that do not have direct legal service providers to access locally.

We are a team of only four attorneys, one paralegal, and one program coordinator. We help real people with real problems, all while teaching the next generation of law students to be holistic legal care providers. Because many government grants restrict the populations and subject areas that we can serve, we have very limited funding to ensure that we don’t limit our ability to help people with their changing financial problems.

In order to meet the demand without sacrificing on service, we ask anyone and everyone who is capable of navigating technology, like this website, our videos, podcasts, and Zoom, to please serve yourself with our guidance. This allows us to use more of our limited resources on the people who are not able to advocate effectively for themselves.

Thank you for freeing up space and helping your fellow human community.

STILL Need Help from Us?

We may be able to help you at one of our clinics. In order for us to provide you help, we’ll need your basic contact information, financial status, and details about your issue. We are a very small unit with a very high demand for our services. In order to meet most of the demand, we ask that all potential clients help us help you; do as much as you can on your own. Get started by filling out our intake information and get added to our line for legal help.

Also, we know how taxing it is to relive your problem in order to get help. Please understand that we only require information that is needed to serve you.

Important, save your time and ours, by reading through these points first:

  1. We limit our free legal services to the most needy people with very little access to other options. As such, we require information about your personal financial status in order to determine if we are able to help you.

  2. You do not need to be a documented citizen to qualify for our services.

  3. We offer three modes of service:

    1. One-on-one assistance reserved only for people who are unable to self-help. These are people who cannot navigate their phone well, or use basic email functions.

    2. Asynchronous assistance for people who can self-help but need guidance. If you are able to fill out the online forms, you are highly encouraged to do so. This will help us use our time on people who can’t fill out forms and serve more people, it will also shorten the queue and help us get back to you sooner.

    3. Drop-in assistance at one of our drop-in clinics. This is open to all. Information can be found here.

  4. We provide legal advice and guidance for you to represent yourself. In only limited cases, we provide representation on a case by case basis.

  5. Most importantly, regardless of whether you fill out the forms online or over the phone, the more responsive information you provide to the question, the better we can work on next steps with you. Being vague, or skipping questions results in slowing down the process, and we may need to refer you elsewhere so that we can protect our own capacity to assist those who are capable of meeting our needs.

  6. We are a clinical educator for Berkeley Law. You will work with different law student under the supervision of an attorney for your issue.

To get started, please fill out our intake form by selecting the issue you need help with. This will get you in the queue for our review in order to get you on our calendar for an appointment. Keep point 5 above in mind as you fill our your form.

Practices areas we don’t do:

  • Tax issues

  • Business debt

  • Government debt

  • Administrative debt

  • Utilities

  • Medical debt

  • Child support

  • Employment issues

  • Foreclosure

  • Mortgage issues

  • Probate/trust

  • Insurance issues

  • Police misconduct

  • Discrimination

  • Individuals versus individual matters

  • Bringing non-impact litigation affirmative cases

If you are not able to complete these online forms, you can contact us for a phone intake at (510) 548-4040 ext. 206.

Just note that it may take longer to complete due to our low manpower capacity.