Downtown Legal Services

About Downtown Legal Services

Downtown Legal Services (DLS) is a community legal clinic and clinical education program operated by the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. It traces back to the Students' Legal Aid Society, a student run initiative established by U of T law students in 1969. By the summer of 1971 the society was running 16 community clinics with 23 law students, who together handled 710 cases, and students petitioned the law school to bring the clinic into the curriculum for course credit. The faculty hired its first supervising staff lawyer, Richard "Dick" Gathercole, and the program was named Downtown Legal Services in 1982.

Today the clinic is based in the Fasken building on Spadina Avenue and works across divisions covering family law, housing law, employment law, criminal law, disability, health and income security, refugee and immigration law, prison law, and university academic tribunals, with social work support available to clients. Around 140 law students work at DLS each year, including 28 paid summer caseworkers, and the clinic serves more than two thousand people annually. It's funded by Legal Aid Ontario, the Law Foundation of Ontario, the Faculty of Law, U of T students, and alumni donations, and more than 5,000 Faculty of Law alumni have passed through the clinic since it began.