Cleary Gottlieb and Toynbee Hall Celebrate Women’s Free Legal Advice Clinic in East London

Cleary Gottlieb’s London office hosted a reception to celebrate its longstanding partnership with the Toynbee Hall Women’s Free Legal Advice Clinic.

The Toynbee Hall Women’s Free Legal Advice Clinic is a safe and welcoming environment for women across London to seek legal support on areas ranging from housing and employment law to family law and domestic violence. The majority of women using this essential service have suffered abuse and have no other recourse to legal support.

Since 2015, Cleary has sponsored and staffed the Toynbee Hall Women’s Free Legal Advice Clinic on Saturday mornings. In collaboration with expert advisers at Toynbee Hall, our female lawyers have dedicated thousands of pro bono hours to volunteering at this service. The clinic has for many years been committed to a Psychologically Informed Environment model, acknowledging that the needs of its clients can extend far beyond legal advice and making every effort to address extra-legal barriers that prevent people exercising their rights.

A client who visited the clinic in January testified to the effectiveness of this model, “I am stunned by the quality of your work on my case – and that of your colleagues – the care you have taken, and the amount of detail incorporated and the clarity of your recommendations. It all makes perfect sense. I really am most grateful for the empathic response and incisive approach. This is just what I had always hoped for but never experienced till now. It shows how important a knowledge of the law and a legally trained mind are to disentangling these apparently intractable problems.”

Having operated the clinic without interruption as a remote service since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cleary is delighted to announce that Toynbee Hall will be re-establishing in-person advice sessions at its historic center in East London. We hope that this development, enabled in part through the firm’s sponsorship, will ensure that the communities served by this partnership can access justice for many years to come.