organizational overview

Movement driven,
Community funded,
Sliding scale legal support
Law for all the rest.

The law leaves most of our community out.

W/REST is a new approach. Building on the cooperative model, W/REST combines a community cooperative with a collective law firm: the Rest Cooperative and the Wrest Collective. The  Rest Cooperative brings minoritized and other left-out groups together with community wealth. The Wrest Collective gathers talented, movement-oriented lawyers to support the cooperative and broader community with legal representation, training, counsel, and other support. In collaboration together, we can reimagine how clients, community, and lawyers make change and create justice.

Cooperative membership means:

• A voice in the cases that we take and the work that we do
• Access to trainings, workshops, clinics, and office hours for legal consultations
• Peer support opportunities for clients—past, present, and future
• Connection to a network of organizers and activists in Boise
• Potential returns on the cost of your membership as W/REST gathers steam

What do we work on?

Cooperative members and community movements drive W/REST’s priorities.

Our lawyers’ skills include:

The cooperative and collective will be jointly funded through a combination of cooperative memberships offered to community members on a sliding scale, contracts with other non-profits and community partners to provide legal services, reduced fee for service legal work, and attorney fee awards. The scope of cases in which we intend to provide representation includes:

• Eviction Defense and Landlord-tenant Law

• Criminal Defense
• Civil Rights
• Immigration
• Prisoner Rights
• Public Records Requests
• Employment/Educational Discrimination
• Name Change/Transition
• Wills/Powers of Attorney
• Consumer Protection
• Police Misconduct
• Environmental Justice
• Entity/Organizational Formation
• Family Law Litigation

• Family Law Transactional/LGBTQ planning
• Freedom of Information Act Requests
• Journalism
• Social Security
• Conservatorships/Guardianships
• Expulsion/STPP
• IDEA
• Wage & Hour/Labor conditions
• Judicial Conduct
• Tribal Court
• Post-Conviction Relief
• Medicaid
• Unemployment

Ultimately, the cases that we focus on and the work that we do will be informed by the needs of our community and the voices of the cooperative members.