San Francisco Bay Area Tenant Lawyers

Tobener Ravenscroft is the leading tenant rights firm in the San Francisco Bay Area. The firm has collected millions of dollars on behalf of its clients, assisting more than 10,000 tenants through problems with their tenancies, including wrongful evictions, intractable repair issues, landlord harassment and discrimination, and landlord-caused injuries. The firm won the SF Bay Guardian Small Business of the Year. It has been featured in California Lawyer and the Daily Journal, and has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, Wired, the L.A. Times, NPR, and Reuters. The firm is dedicated to employee activism, and sponsors all of its lawyers to volunteer weekly at legal nonprofits, equaling nearly 500 community hours each year. The firm is respected as San Francisco tenant lawyers who lead the way among their peers and has represented countless attorneys and the San Francisco Tenants Union.

Tenant lawyers serving San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco, Fremont, San Rafael, Berkeley and surrounding Bay Area cities. We stop landlord harassment, refusal to repair, and wrongful evictions. In rent-controlled jurisdictions, we fight illegal rent increases, landlord move-in evictions (OMIs and RMIs), Ellis Act evictions, and tenant evictions for renovations and capital improvements.

Joseph Tobener is the managing attorney at the Tobener Ravenscroft. An attorney for more than twenty years, Mr. Tobener draws on his specialized expertise as a tenant lawyer to provide caring, easy-to-understand, and aggressive assistance to a diverse clientele. He has represented thousands of Bay Area residents on tenant law issues and earned millions on behalf of his clients. He has appeared on KALW, NPR, and KQED and was featured in the SF Bay Guardian, the Daily Journal, and California Lawyer. Cases he has successfully litigated have been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, and Wired. He has spoken extensively on tenant law for the San Francisco Bar Association and the Alameda Bar Association. His clients have included countless lawyers, high-tech executives, mobile home residents, the San Francisco Tenants Union, and several art collectives. One of his passions is working to preserve artist live/work housing. He also worked for Home Base, a homelessness law nonprofit and has been an adjunct professor at San Francisco State University and UC College of Law, San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings). The firm is dedicated to employee activism, and sponsors each of its lawyers to volunteer weekly in the community at housing rights nonprofits, donating nearly 500 attorney hours each year.