At Pivot Legal Society, we practice a nontraditional style of legal work, informed by the principles of movement lawyering, strategic litigation, and community organizing traditions.

Founded in 2001 in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, our organization’s work focuses on the intersecting legal regimes of drug prohibition, housing precarity, sex workers’ rights, policing and criminalization, and stigma against people marginalized because of their social condition.

Our work supports the expertise and power of people directly impacted by the colonial laws and legal systems we work within, and attempts to redistribute power, knowledge, and resources toward those historically excluded from legal institutions such as law-making and decision-making bodies.

Pivot works to support movement-led strategies to decriminalize sex work; end the prohibition on drugs; root out social, structural, and legal sources of stigma; and ensure that there is adequate and accessible housing for all. We work directly with and alongside community members to:

• increase community analysis and understanding of the current colonial legal system as well as their rights within that system;
• share strategies, tools, and resources about how to engage with and navigate legal processes and government systems;
• deeply listen to, collect, and convey communities’ lived experience with harmful laws to institutions operating within the legal system; and
• ensure that community’s lived experience perspectives are actively and meaningfully involved in addressing harms and shaping equity-oriented laws and policies.

We also strategically use colonial legal system tools, such as litigation or legal complaints, to challenge harmful laws and policies. This may include defending individuals and groups drawn into legal proceedings through injunctions and other state actions, or working alongside community members impacted by the colonial legal system to bring their wisdom and experience into legal processes.

Our style of practice necessarily responds to the daily reality of individual and organizational clients who face racism, state repression, economic and social marginalization, and justified skepticism about law as a tool for change. We know that colonial court and legal systems were not set up to support accessibility and transparency for people experiencing multiple overlapping and amplifying exclusions and harms. As a result, the way we develop arguments, collect evidence, and navigate court hearings can raise unique challenges.

For example, we develop arguments by first seeking to deeply understand the perspectives and approaches of our clients, instead of turning to precedent and trying to “educate” or “demystify” the law for our clients. Our arguments focus on reflecting the lived realities and needs of our clients, within a legal framework. This demands a large investment of time, building trust and creating relationships.

As another example, collecting evidence is frequently challenging, as many of our clients and affiants don’t have regular access to a phone or the internet, don’t have a fixed place to stay because of the housing crisis, experience overlapping health crises, and may be regularly detained or jailed by law enforcement.

Navigating court hearings is a particular challenge in our practice. We try to ensure our clients have an opportunity to witness the process in as trauma-informed a way as possible, with trusted navigators providing information, debriefing and supports inside and outside of the courtroom.

Necessarily, we approach our legal work with creativity and humility, knowing legal tools are only one part of broader movements for change.

Some recent examples of our work include:

• convening a panel about the impacts of gendered and racialized policing and criminalization on Black sex workers;
• intervening at the Supreme Court of Canada in a case related to policing at drug overdoses;
• filing a police policy complaint about the excessive and discriminatory use of force at protests related to Palestinian rights.