When retirees Doug Ridley and Sherry Shen ran out of money to pay their legal bills amid a yearslong battle with their homeowners association, their attorneys agreed to push on without pay.
Lawyers Terence and Mary Ann O’Hara — a San Jose husband-and-wife team who have been married for 37 years — agreed that helping the couple whose lives were upended in 2018 over an abandoned artesian well that sprang to life beneath their Santa Clara condo was the right thing to do.
“Most normal people can’t afford to have a lawyer fight for them, but Doug and Sherry are just salt of the earth kind of people,” Mary Ann O’Hara said. “There was no way we could have abandoned them without following through with everything.”…