spotlight

When she looks back on her 10-year ALRP career, Managing Attorney Sara Malan remembers the people she’s served. “Soon after I started at ALRP as a staff attorney I did my first emergency will,” she said. “I went to the hospital to help a client. It was very emotional, and I was so glad to have done something so useful…”

Jeff Jacobi, an ALRP Board Executive Committee member, says he likes to stand up for people who have been marginalized. That might be because of his upbringing in Grand Forks, North Dakota, which taught him in more than one way about the importance of helping others. “The people there are more trusting than they are in San Francisco,” he said. “The natural inclination when we meet people is to think: how can we help them?”

When ALRP Board Member David Tsai wrote his law school admissions essay describing a client he would be excited to help, he envisioned a transgender, HIV+ person from Mexico. “Just by chance,” he said, “when I became a lawyer the first pro bono case I took on happened to be an HIV+ transgender woman from Mexico.”

Panel Attorney Mary Catherine Wiederhold recently had a sobering moment in court while representing an ALRP client in an eviction case. When the issue came up about my client being HIV+, the judge seemed to downplay the impact of HIV. said Mary Catherine. ALRP Staff Attorney John Fasesky was with me, and he told her about the discrimination that people with HIV face every day.