Legal Grounds is a new service offering legal and practical advice and analysis in the Mission/Dolores neighborhood.
Our services are available to anyone with a legal question, including artists, self-employed, unemployed, over-employed, families, neighborhood businesses and organizations, tenants, teenagers, retired folk, cyclists, car drivers and passengers, the LGBTQ and straight communities, people of all ethnicities, and miscellaneous others.
Services are available to people in need of advice in the process of representing themselves, people with a simple legal question, people wanting a lawyer to review a document, or the merely curious.
Legal Grounds seeks to provide a creative, non-litigation forum for discussing the sorts of legal problems, conflicts and questions that arise every day for ordinary San Franciscans.
Annie Thorkelson is a lawyer, mediator, counselor and researcher with over 20 years experience in a wide range of civil and family law matters, and in a variety of dispute resolution methods. more...
SAN FRANCISCO - Melton Cartes wavered between desperation and resignation. He had been trying to catch up with mounting credit cards bills but fell behind when his employer, an ad agency, folded.
He received an ominous notice to appear in court over the unpaid bills.
Living with his girlfriend and trying to get into filmmaking, Cartes hardly could afford hiring a lawyer to advise him about legal options for his upcoming court proceeding.
So on a recent sunny afternoon in San Francisco, he found himself sitting at a table in a bustling Mission District cafe near Dolores Park, getting legal advice from veteran attorney Annie Thorkelson for $1 per minute.
Thorkelson, who has become disillusioned after 25 years of practice, mostly in family law, came up with the idea to offer legal advice along the lines of the psychiatrist's booth set up by Lucy in the "Peanuts" comic strip. ...Cont'd.