Celebrating 7 Years of the Legal Network for Gender Equity at the National Women’s Law Center
Liz Chacko, senior counsel - National Women’s Law Center
For many years, I worked as a lawyer and legal director at a workers’ rights organization where we served low-paid, immigrant, migrant, and largely rural populations. My colleagues and I often conducted intakes with workers who had experienced workplace sexual harassment. While we could serve some of them, overall, we noticed that there were few options for legal help for these survivors - and that the process for finding a good lawyer was opaque, at best, for many of the individuals who sought legal help.
So, in 2017, I was intrigued when I began hearing about a new, national legal network that aimed to make access to justice more accessible for survivors of sexual violence. In January of that year, the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) created the Legal Network for Gender Equity. The Legal Network was an ambitious attempt to provide support to survivors of sex harassment and discrimination at a time when many people saw on the horizon imminent and unprecedented threats to the rights of women and girls. Attorneys who join the Legal Network agree to provide free legal consultations to people who NWLC connects to them on matters relating to sex discrimination in employment, education, and healthcare settings. Sometimes, those connections result in an attorney-client relationship forming. Other times, the survivor receives valuable information that can help inform them about what legal options, if any, are available to them.
The Legal Network for Gender Equity provides support to survivors of sex harassment and discrimination.
As those of you reading this know, many of the threats to gender justice that we foresaw in early 2017 materialized in devastating ways. Calls from survivors to the Legal Network’s intake line poured in during those early days, propelled by the national outpouring of #MeToo stories. Around that time, I became a member of the Legal Network for Gender Equity and began directing survivors who I could not personally serve to it, as well. As a member of the Legal Network, I was heartened to know that hundreds of other lawyers across the country were doing work, day in and day out, on behalf of survivors of sexual harassment and that they, too, recognized the lack of resources available to survivors and wanted to help fill that gap.
Membership in the Legal Network comes with benefits, too - like access to regular, high-quality webinars, CLEs, and updates on key issues in the law, as well as eligibility for financial assistance from the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund, which the National Women’s Law Center co-founded in 2018 to help support cases involving workplace sex harassment and related retaliation. In the early days of the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund, NWLC leaders sought and received valuable input from the Impact Fund! That guidance, from Jocelyn Larkin and others, helped shape the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund, which continues to support workplace sexual harassment litigation today. Especially in cases like those I used to handle as a legal services lawyer, that extra support can be vital. For example, in one case where I represented a group of farmworker women who had been sexually harassed and assaulted by their supervisor, support from the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund covered discovery and travel related expenses that neither my organization nor my clients could easily cover.
Although the collective national outrage fueling the anti-sexual harassment movement may have faded since 2017, those of us who represent survivors know that sex-based discrimination and harassment persist at pernicious levels. Today, hundreds of lawyers across the country are part of the Legal Network for Gender Equity, which I now help manage in my current role as Senior Counsel at NWLC. Since its founding, the Legal Network has connected over 9,000 survivors of sex discrimination and harassment to attorneys. In my role at NWLC, I now also help review applications sent to the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund, which has provided financial assistance in over 400 cases.
Despite these successes, our work is not done. As you all know, the fight for gender justice continues. So, if you are not already a member, I invite you to join the Legal Network for Gender Equity – which turns 7 in January! - and to invite your colleagues to do the same.