PROFESSIONAL BIOGRAPHY OF
AL HOFELD, JR.

                          

Al Hofeld, Jr., is a 2000 graduate of Northwestern University School of Law (J.D.), a 1994 graduate of the University of Chicago Divinity School (M.Div.) and a 1990 graduate of Reed College (B.A. in Economics). In law school, he was the 1999 recipient of the Justice John Paul Stevens Public Interest Fellowship and a 2000 Public Interest Law Initiative (PILI) fellow at Chicago Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights under Law. In 1998 and 1999, he worked in the law school’s legal clinic on the cases of innocent men on death row and men tortured by former Area Two Police Commander Jon Burge.

From 2000 to 2002, Al was an Equal Justice Works (formerly National Association of Public Interest Law) fellow at the Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago. In that capacity, he performed the research, legal work, outreach and fund-raising necessary to establish the South Side Community Federal Credit Union – a not-for-profit, community development financial institution (CDFI) serving low- and moderate-income people on Chicago’s south side as an affordable alternative to currency exchanges and predatory lenders. He later served two terms as Chairman of the Board, two terms as Vice Chairman, and has served on the credit committee from the institution’s inception in 2003.

From 2002 to 2003, Al was a staff attorney at the Legal Assistance Foundation’s central intake office in downtown Chicago, where he was involved in litigation in the areas of eviction defense, employment benefits, domestic violence and family law, and public and subsidized housing. From 2003 to 2008, he was an associate at a Chicago consumer rights law firm, where he focused almost exclusively on litigating federal cases against predatory mortgage lenders, brokers and banks. He also handled several class actions, including cases against the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services (formerly the Illinois Department of Public Aid) and the Chicago Transit Authority. On February 27, 2008, he opened his own law firm, the Law Offices of Al Hofeld, Jr., LLC and the Social Justice Project, Inc., a public interest law practice specializing primarily in the prosecution of Truth in Lending Act, fraud, racial discrimination and other predatory mortgage lending abuses on behalf of low-income and minority borrowers.

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