“There’s this idea that the law is neutral, that the practice of law is neutral, and that it’s actually inappropriate to talk about the moral or political ramifications of lawyer actions,” says Molly Coleman, executive director of the People’s Parity Project, a nonprofit whose slogan is “unf*ck the law.”
In early 2018 during their first year at Harvard Law School, Coleman and her peers began organizing around forced arbitration clauses in contracts, specifically those many law students were compelled to sign as a condition of summer associate programs offered by top law firms. Their movement was turbocharged by the broader #MeToo movement, which hit the legal profession in particular when Judge Alex Kozinski, a feeder judge for the U.S. Supreme Court, was accused by several individuals, including former clerks, of sexual harassment and workplace misconduct. (He resigned before the investigation could be fully concluded.) The hearing around now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination further galvanized the movement.
Almost eight years later, People’s Parity continues to push forward—and its issue areas have expanded from worker power to democracy defense, with a committed group of law students and lawyers trying to change the legal profession from the inside out. For Coleman, it’s all connected, but the ask is hard. “If we can change the culture of the legal profession, there is no limit to what we can change in terms of the structures of society,” she says. “But cultural change is really hard.”
Beginnings
When Coleman and her cofounders—Sejal Singh, Emma Janger, and Vail Kohnert-Yount—began organizing in 2018, it was a grassroots operation. “Law students are great at debating moral philosophy and ethics, and that’s wonderful, but they’re not always good about taking those morals out of the classroom,” says Janger, who is now on the board of People’s Parity Action, their 501(c)(4) organization.
Kohnert-Yount distinctly remembers sitting in civil procedure, learning about all the ways that people pursue justice and see their cases to court. Instead, clauses mandating arbitration—a private dispute system—are placed into employment and consumer contracts as a way to skirt the court system, the professor explained. “As Americans, we take for granted our right to have our claims heard in front of a jury,” says Kohnert-Yount. “But instead, I learned that corporations and their lawyers found a way to bury one sentence in a contract and keep regular people—for example, a restaurant worker being sexually harassed by her boss or a customer being cheated by their cellphone company—from being able to access the civil justice system we had just spent months learning about.”
When the cofounders went to the HLS administration to ask them to ban recruiting from law firms that have forced arbitration clauses, they heard that the administration did not know which firms included such clauses in their contracts. “There wasn’t data on how widespread the practice was,” says Coleman. “We thought, well, we have an information gap here. We’ve heard some individual stories, thanks to some brave people who have leaked their contracts, but we clearly need more comprehensive data.”
The group, who at the time called themselves the Pipeline Parity Project, began collecting the information themselves and distributing it; it was critical that they understood who used forced arbitration clauses not just for lawyers but also for their nonlegal staff. Once they had robust data, the group began pressing law firms to drop such clauses.
PPP began leafletting at law firms, encouraging HLS affinity groups not to take firm money, encouraging students to protest recruitment, and more. They also used the media to tell their story, “making clear that law students do have perspectives on the moral agency of lawyers and how lawyers have and have not built a legal system to serve justice,” says Coleman.
Coleman and her cofounders didn’t have a 10-year plan nor a fundraising pitch, but they were always thinking bigger. They started with forced arbitration clauses because it was something many law students would personally experience. “We needed people to feel that they as individuals had a stake in these systems in order to persuade them to take on the work of trying to change the system,” Coleman says.
If we can change the culture of the legal profession, there is no limit to what we can change in terms of the structures of society.
Molly Coleman, executive director, People’s Parity Project
After seeing students engage, PPP shifted the narrative. “If you personally don’t want to be subjected to a forced arbitration clause, you also should not be willing to write a forced arbitration clause into a worker’s contract,” Coleman told her peers at HLS.
As the group ramped up its efforts, they began to hear from law students on other campuses and practicing lawyers. Singh remembers interning in legal aid in San Francisco the summer after her first year and sitting on public transit when the Epic Systems Co. vs. Lewis Supreme Court case decision came down, further hobbling workers against forced arbitration. “I remember immediately hearing from students all around the country who were enraged about it and who had been paying attention to the work that we were doing related to arbitration and sexual harassment and racial discrimination,” she says. “And it just felt like there was this moment of momentum where students were trying to get together and put our heads together and think about what it was we could do,” she adds.
“At PPP, we’re thinking about everything from the smallest provisions in a worker’s contract up to the size, shape, power, and composition of the U.S. Supreme Court and everything in between,” Coleman says, “because if you’re talking about how our legal system operates, you have to be thinking about all of that.” In the summer of 2019, the cofounders decided to incorporate as a 501(c)(3), establishing satellite chapters around the country at other law schools.
PPP was ultimately successful in pressuring a number of firms to drop their clauses—for all employees, not just the lawyers—and, Kohnert-Yount hopes, preventing those who might have followed suit and included them in contracts to think twice. Beyond the law firms, PPP’s actions certainly led to increased attention to such legal tools and the ways they might inflict harm on workers, and in 2022 President Biden signed the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, precluding the use of arbitration in sexual assault and harassment cases.
Growing beyond law school
By the time the four law students graduated in 2020, it was clear the organization had staying power. Coleman agreed to stay on for one year as executive director in a “trial period.”
“We thought: This is a massive experiment,” Coleman says. “We’ll see what happens, and if it ends up being one year and then I go back to being a public defender or something, all well and good. But I think really what we saw is that there was no shortage of work and there was no shortage of energy.”
Singh, Janger, and Kohnert-Yount all started their careers in fellowships and in employment law. But they stayed involved. At PPP, Janger was focused on fundraising and finances, setting up the organization for success before both she and Singh planned to do one-year federal clerkships.
When you’re talking about stories about systems, you’re often talking about the role of lawyers.
Molly Coleman
PPP decided early on that that they were not going to take money from Big Law. “Funding is always challenging when you’re talking about tackling the issue of corporate capture of the legal system,” says Coleman. Still, they managed to fundraise enough to keep going. After Singh and Janger finished their clerkships, they began setting up their 501(c)(4) organization, People’s Parity Action, which allowed them to do more organizing around elections.
Students, and particularly law students, are particularly well poised to speak to the importance of state and local elections, says Janger, especially when it comes to potentially confusing structures and elected positions. “Law students know who the chief justice of the Court of Appeals of New York, know why that court matters, and can understand how important the chief justice is to the lives of ordinary people,” Janger says. “Judicial systems are confusing on purpose, but they have stakes for workers, which is the PPP’s organizing sweet spot.”
Changing the profession
Today, PPP has four full-time staff members—as well as a board of directors and an advisory council of public-interest-oriented lawyers and academics—and 20 law school chapters and four lawyers’ chapters. Singh, who cofounded the Washington, D.C. lawyers’ chapter, says they contend with the same challenges other organizers do: the people they are trying to galvanize have limited time, kids, and full-time jobs. Further, lawyers—like many—are cautious. “In addition to being professionals, we are people who have the power of numbers and of the persuasiveness of our ideas,” Singh says. “In that respect, I don’t think our profession is unique. We have many of the same sources one can leverage as other workers—and we are afraid of the same things. Workers across all industries, whether that’s law or manufacturing or health care, feel like they’re under scrutiny, and they know they could get in a lot of trouble if their boss finds out that they’re organizing. But we win when we refuse to be intimidated and are willing to build people power with one another.” For Singh, who is now a labor lawyer, “I see it as part of my job to identify the ways that the legal system is rigged against workers, against consumers, against people who are just trying to get a fair shake in this economy and to do something about that.”
Janger, who is now a litigator, admits that she would not have taken a job that was not OK with her organizing work. She says that law students—as they learn about some of the ways the legal system operates and before they have too many work conflicts—“are uniquely well positioned to be brave and speak.” But she says, in addition, litigators can be too careful.
“I am not in front of every judge in the country, and I’m never going to say something that’s going to harm one of my cases. That’s my first priority and my ethical obligation to my clients. But we can still talk about the problem of corporate power on the bench,” she adds.
When Coleman thinks back to where they started organizing around forced arbitration, she says: “A lot of the national conversation was focused on individual bad actors. But as law students, we started to ask, What are the systems that are enabling this? … And when you’re talking about stories about systems, you’re often talking about the role of lawyers.”
Kohnert-Yount, who, after graduating, immediately went to work in legal aid in Texas and now works in union leadership, thinks it “would have been easy to stop at organizing amongst law students,” she says. But she always saw how the challenges flowed to all workers. In that first job after law school in Texas, she was working with low-wage workers, and People’s Parity offered an outlet to work on some of the bigger systemic issues that were flowing down to her clients. She says, “Whenever I was frustrated with the structural barriers I encountered in my casework, I would pour more effort into People’s Parity. We need to build this movement to tear down the bigger inequities.” To that end, she recalls a moment when one of her legal aid clients was materially helped when the bill banning forced arbitration in sexual harassment cases that People’s Parity supported was signed into law.
We fight cases on the field of the law rather than fully understanding that the law itself is made by the people who practice it.
Emma Janger, co-founder, People’s Parity
Today, Coleman says, PPP looks at the granular: they want to stop forced arbitration, noncompetes, and nondisclosures. They are examining the backgrounds of judges to see who are making the decisions that govern everyone’s daily lives and asking, Could those judges have a larger diversity of experiences? They are working to change the narrative by writing op-eds and getting to law students before they submit to the status quo or the burden of debt. They recently released a toolkit for Big Law organizing—in the wake of law firms making deals with the Trump administration—which takes the perspective of law students, law firm associates, and outside counsel and includes various strategies for resistance.
PPP’s work largely arises from what they hear on the ground, and, as Coleman says: “It really is about changing how lawyers and law students conceptualize their role in the fight for justice.”
“The problem is seeing the law as this immovable thing,” says Janger. “We fight cases on the field of the law rather than fully understanding that the law itself is made by the people who practice it.”
“There’s so much work to be done, both in order to continue achieving progress but also to prevent the rollback of rights that we’re seeing currently,” Coleman says. “If we don’t take the time to deeply analyze the legal system and to think about what it looks like to fundamentally reform it and to change the culture amongst legal practitioners, then the other work is never going to get easier.”
