Jim works with low-income tenants and community organizations to enforce their legal rights to fair, safe, and affordable housing. Before joining Housing Justice Center in January 2020, Jim worked for 19 years as lead trial counsel at one of the top law firms in the country, Faegre Baker Daniels, where he won dozens of complex, high-stakes cases frequently involving disputes over $100M. Before that, Jim worked as a law clerk for a federal district court judge in Minnesota after graduating magna cum laude from the University of Minnesota Law School, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Minnesota Law Review. Jim has been consistently ranked as one of the top civil litigators in the country by Best Lawyers in America and IAM 1000 World’s Leading Litigation Professionals: “Jim Poradek is one of the most gifted oral advocates anywhere; . . . brilliant at taking complex technical subject matter and making it easy to understand and, above all, interesting.” Jim’s work in housing justice law goes back to the 1990s, when he worked as a community organizer and affordable housing activist in Washington, DC., and did scholarly work on access to justice and affordable housing at the University of Minnesota Law School. At Faegre, Jim developed the firm’s pro bono tenant rights enforcement practice and served as lead counsel in many successful tenant rights lawsuits, including a groundbreaking consumer fraud class action against predatory landlords that resulted in a class settlement that returned millions of dollars in rent to tenants. Jim received the 2018 Baker Benson Pro Bono Award for his tenant rights work and was recognized by the Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court for “extraordinary efforts to help low-income tenants [that] sets a shining example for all in the legal profession.” Jim’s approach as a litigator is the same today with housing rights clients as it was with Fortune 500 clients when he worked at Faegre: he believes in rolling up his sleeves and working side-by-side with clients and colleagues to develop creative strategies that achieve high-impact wins for his clients.