Paws for Justice is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a single, simple mission: bring the legal community together to give shelter pets a second chance. We don’t build new events or ask anyone to clear their calendar. We meet attorneys where they already are, and turn the gatherings they already attend into the beginning of something for an animal who’s waiting. One conference, one adoption, one friendship at a time.
Our mission lives at an unlikely intersection. Reduce the burden on overcrowded shelters. Introduce legal professionals to the joy of pet adoption. And do it side by side with the people who already meet, gather, and travel together every quarter — turning a community built on advocacy into advocates for animals, too.
Paws for Justice creates second chances for shelter animals by uniting attorneys, law firms, and legal organizations behind three things they’re uniquely positioned to provide: adoption events, shelter partnerships, and direct funding. We bring adoptable pets to legal conferences, forge lasting relationships between firms and local shelters, and channel real resources toward the animals who need them most.
Long before Paws for Justice had a name, it had a dog.
For more than 15 years, Ric Perez has been a familiar presence in the legal community. Through his work at Strategic Capital Corporation, providing post-settlement funding solutions for annuitants and attorneys, he built his career on the quiet engine the profession actually runs on: trust, and the relationships that come with it. He knew the conference circuit by heart. The same association meetings, the same hotel ballrooms, the same faces, season after season.
Then he started bringing Buddy.
Buddy was a corgipoo, small, charming, and completely indifferent to the formalities of a convention hall. And he changed the room. Attorneys who’d spent all day deep in settlements and case law would stop mid-conversation, crouch down, and light up. Business cards still changed hands, but so did stories, laughter, and the kind of unguarded connection that’s rare among people who spend their working lives being careful. Over the years, Buddy turned countless routine meetings into real friendships. He made an entire industry feel a little more human.
Buddy has since crossed the rainbow bridge. But his spirit lives on at home with Ric and his husband, Adrian Goh, and with the two new family members who followed: Milo and Toby. They’re proof of the idea Buddy planted, that the legal community could become a force for animals who have no one to advocate for them.
That idea became Paws for Justice. We held our first adoption event on May 3, 2025, with a simple model: bring shelter pets to the places legal professionals already gather, and let the connection Buddy created happen on its own. Adrian has been at it since the beginning, and he’s still the first one there and the last to leave. Today we carry that work forward through adoption events, shelter partnerships, and direct funding, drawing on the very relationships Ric spent a career building.
Every adoption we help make possible is a small tribute to one corgipoo who understood something the rest of us had to learn: connection changes lives, on both ends of the leash.
— RIC PEREZ · IN LOVING MEMORY OF BUDDY (2010 – 2024)
Our leadership team has completed advanced certifications from Southern Utah University — equipping us with cutting-edge knowledge in animal care and welfare. These programs ensure we stay at the forefront of the field, with access to the latest resources and techniques.
When you choose to partner with Paws For Justice, you’re choosing a team of certified professionals dedicated to excellence in animal advocacy.
Every animal deserves a loving home. Together with the legal community, we make that real — one adoption at a time.
