Community Legal Assistance Society (CLAS)

About Community Legal Assistance Society (CLAS)

Community Legal Assistance Society (CLAS) is a non-profit law firm based in downtown Vancouver. It was incorporated on March 29, 1971 as the Vancouver Community Legal Assistance Society, making it BC's first community law office, and it changed its name to CLAS in 1989 once its work had grown to cover the rest of the province. Mike Harcourt, who later became Vancouver's mayor and BC's premier, founded the organization and served as its first executive director. Its second executive director, Ian Waddell, went on to serve as a BC MLA and a federal MP.

CLAS operates as an umbrella organization built around several programs, each staffed by lawyers who focus on a specific area of law. It currently runs the Community Law Program for poverty law matters, the BC Human Rights Clinic, the Mental Health Law Program (representing people detained under the BC Mental Health Act since 1977), the Community Advocate Support Line, and the Community Legal Advocate Supervision Program. Its lawyers have appeared in hundreds of reported decisions, including cases at the Supreme Court of Canada, and CLAS also supervised the Law Students' Legal Advice Program at the UBC law school until 2012. In 2015 the BC Human Rights Coalition merged into CLAS, bringing the BC Human Rights Clinic under CLAS's management, and CLAS marked its 50th anniversary in March 2021.