Description:

Overview of Position:
Housing has the attention of everyone in the country and especially the SF Bay Area. A safe and healthy home is a universal human need, yet it is consistently unrealized or threatened for those in poverty or those overlooked by our country's racist systems. All San Francisco tenants have the rare right to receive free legal counsel to help ensure people who call this “cool gray city” home may continue to do so without constant fear of eviction, outrageous rent hikes, or unsafe living conditions. Open Door Legal provides holistic, trauma-informed housing services helping people access everything they need to feel safe and secure in their homes. Through our work we also deter bad actors who prioritize wealth from continuing to disenfranchise low-income San Franciscans.

We're hiring a Managing Housing Attorney who will lead, manage, and direct Open Door Legal's highly-effective Housing Team. Overall, this position is intended to be a challenging and rewarding experience for someone looking to grow in their substantive and strategic leadership and change lives along the way. You should approach problems with curiosity and enthusiasm. Your leadership is demonstrated in the quality of the people you've led AND the work you've produced together. Cultural humility is not just conceptual to you, you embody it and commit to growth. Success in this role requires grit, dynamism, teamwork, care, and passion (also our team's five values). You will report directly to our Director of Legal Services

Responsibilities:

Manage the largest department at Open Door Legal to ensure that we are continually pursuing our mission of universal access to legal services with housing-related legal needs. This includes the day-to-day supervision and support of our highly effective and passionate housing attorneys and advocates (currently 5).
Hire, train, support, and manage through influence the performance of all housing department staff, interns, and volunteers in collaboration with the Director of Talent and Culture.
Drive and implement the strategic vision for Open Door Legal's housing cases and growth as a department to eventually cover the housing needs of the entire city of San Francisco.
Develop and maintain public relations with government agencies, decision-makers, other legal aid organizations, and the community.
Drive the creation of uniform systems, checklists, solutions, best practice protocols, and templates to increase the capacity of all team members to deliver consistently high-quality work products with minimal supervision, and ensure you and your team are following best practices.
Lead with humility the knowledge management of all areas of housing law for Open Door Legal. Drive the creation of uniform systems, checklists and templates. Along with housing team members, bring and develop innovative solutions to tricky issues around case capacity concerns, intake distribution, case opening standards, verification of quality control and onboarding new attorneys.
Directly represent clients which may require court appearances. Ideally spending 20-30% of time on billable case work.
Litigate affirmative housing cases in San Francisco Superior Court both solo and with pro bono attorneys as co-counsel.
Collaborate and work cross-functionally with the Director of Legal Services and Development team to assist with program design, development, grant administration and funding.
Meet with the other practice heads at least bi-monthly to collaborate and coordinate on meeting ODL's mission.
Provide and ensure your team is providing services and support to our low-income clients with sensitivity and awareness to cultural, socio-economic, and disability barriers to service and can skillfully navigate difficult or tense situations. Ensure that the housing department's client feedback rating continues to be positive.
Embrace and embody our values of teamwork, grit, caring, passion, and dynamism.

Requirements:

Membership in good standing with the California State Bar. Applicants without active California bar membership will not be considered. However, those without a license are encouraged to apply to volunteer with us at opendoorlegal.org/volunteer.
Minimum of relevant professional experience is six (6) years.
Minimum of two (2) years of civil litigation experience.
Must show experience directly supervising and building the leadership of staff attorneys and be able to provide references from attorneys supervised.
California housing law and superior court civil procedure knowledge.
Must genuinely enjoy and be motivated by working with low-income clients, many of whom are people of color, and be able to work effectively with clients impacted by trauma (emotional, mental, and physical).
Strong time management skills to effectively supervise and perform legal work in a fast-paced environment and high-volume practice.
Show an enthusiasm for and commitment to self-learning and professional development.
Excellent writing, editing, and proofreading skills, with the ability to be detail-oriented.
Excellent interpersonal and alignment-building skills to excel in providing constructive feedback to people you supervise and in building relationships with other organizations and agencies as ODL's ambassador.
High level of comfortability learning and using technology and case management systems. We use Salesforce, Dropbox, and the Google Suite.
Must be willing to make a minimum two-year commitment to the organization.
This is a hybrid position and will be expected to be in-office at least three (3) days/week.