Medair

Medair CEO, Randall Zindler, talks to us from a Swiss mountain-side about this charitable organization’s use of TrustLaw.

How did you use TrustLaw and how was it useful to Medair?
We discovered TrustLaw through AlertNet. AlertNet is a key place our management team turns to to make decisions in the early stages of a humanitarian crisis. We trust this service to cover crises in the right level of detail and provide long term analysis.

We were actually one of the first charities that the Thomson Reuters Foundation approached about the new service. Our first thought was to use the opportunity to request a brokerage between ourselves and a law firm so that we could open a registered office in Canada to support our work in Haiti and elsewhere around the world. The project is in the early stages but Canada has a strong connection with the Caribbean, providing us with opportunities for more funding and enabling Canadians to play a role in staffing other Medair projects.

The funding should allow us to do more to help those in need in Haiti, where our work focuses on providing shelter for earthquake-affected families in Jacmel and the surrounding rural areas.

The attorneys that TrustLaw connected us with (leading Canadian law firm Torys), delivered a very thorough analysis of our situation. They really understood what we were looking for.

We were pleased and excited to be one of the early adopters of the program. It was clear to me from the start that it would enable us to access knowledge we didn’t possess in-house and presented some great cost-benefits for the charity.

What excites you most about the service?
We work in some very difficult places with complex issues to solve. TrustLaw caters to multiple mandates and can contribute to multiple parts of our organisation.

The website is also user friendly and structured to provide long term benefits through their database of news, information and case studies.

We were impressed with the law firm Torys that we were connected with, and if that’s an indication of the level of quality we can receive in future, that’s fantastic. TrustLaw understand the strategic value of being a broker and are filling an important space.

Where can you see yourself using TrustLaw in future? 

We can use TrustLaw for other pro-bono assistance. It adds to our portfolio of resources that we can tap into. One of the benefits is its global reach and diverse subject expertise when legal counsel is required.

TrustLaw gives us access to resources that we might not have considered otherwise.