Discover qualified LGBTQ professionals in Oakland, CA across all industries and specialties. Connect with lawyers, doctors, accountants, real estate agents, therapists, and other service providers who understand your cultural background, speak your language, and are dedicated to serving the LGBTQ community with excellence and cultural sensitivity.
Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom is a community of LGBTQI+ legal professionals that envisions a world where LGBTQI+ people live with dignity and equality under the law.
Our mission is to lead our LGBTQI+ legal community through advocacy, justice, community empowerment, and professional development.
Bay Area Lawyers for Individual Freedom (BALIF) is the nation's oldest and largest association of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBTQI) persons in the field of law. Founded in 1980, BALIF represents its members’ interests in the wider San Francisco Bay Area. BALIF members and supporters include San Francisco Bay Area judges, lawyers, law students and legal workers.
BALIF was founded to encourage LGBTQI legal professionals to apply to become judges. At the time there were no openly LGBTQI judges. Today there are many!
BALIF also started the organization that grew to become the now-independent AIDS Legal Referral Panel, which has provided free and low-cost legal assistance to over 72,000 people since it was founded in 1983.
Today, BALIF’s mission has expanded. The group takes action on questions of law and justice that affect the LGBTQI community; strengthens professional and social ties among LGBTQI members of the legal profession; builds coalitions with other legal organizations to combat all forms of discrimination; promotes the appointment of LGBTQI attorneys to the judiciary, public agencies and commissions in the Bay Area; funds scholarships for LGBTQI laws students and fellowships for public interest lawyers working on LGBTQI issues, and provides a forum for the exchange of ideas and information of concern to members of the LGBTQI legal community. BALIF also submits amicus briefs in cases affecting the LGBTQI community, sponsors resolutions to the Conference of Delegates of California Bar Associations, provides LGBTQI-focused continuing legal education opportunities and endorses candidates for judicial offices and legal elected positions.
National Trans Bar Association is a national bar association by and for trans legal professionals and cisgender legal professionals who care about trans rights.
The National Trans Bar Association (NTBA) was founded in 2016. Our members hail from different regions of the United States and professional backgrounds. We are diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, and age. We work in government, law firms, and the nonprofit sector. We share a commitment to supporting trans people within and outside the legal profession.
Together we are working to build an organization that welcomes individuals who have historically been underrepresented in the legal profession including trans and cisgender women and femmes, people of color, people who have experienced poverty, people who have been criminalized, or had criminal justice system involvement, and members of immigrant communities. We also welcome people from a range of areas in the legal profession including solo practice, law firms of all sizes, non-profit and social justice organizations, and government, in addition to those working primarily on trans rights advocacy and litigation.
NTBA’s core mission is to support trans people in the legal profession and to increase the trans community’s access to affordable and culturally competent legal services.