Beyond Litigation: Building Your Toolkit to Advance the Public Good

Law school often projects a one-dimensional image of a successful lawyer as that of a rain-maker, federal courts litigator, or trial attorney. Understanding other ways excellence might look like in a day-to-day public interest career might be less talked about and harder to imagine. Join Wasserstein Fellow Maha Ibrahim as she shares some insights and anecdotes from her decade of experience as a civil rights lawyer and discusses some exciting ways an early-career attorney can develop an impactful skillset in conjunction with (or instead of!) just litigation.

Lunch provided. Please RSVP below! Open to the HLS community.

If you or an event participant requires disability-related accommodations, please contact HLS Accessibility Services at accessibility@law.harvard.edu two weeks in advance of the event.

Maha Ibrahim is a Managing Attorney at Equal Rights Advocates in San Francisco, California. An attorney at ERA since 2016, Maha came to ERA with seven years of federal and state policy experience as a Congressional and California State Legislative professional. At ERA, Maha was part of the ERA legal representation that negotiated a $1 million + settlement for women working in non-traditional fields (tradeswomen). Maha’s representation of education civil rights clients has contributed to over $2 million in settlements in Title IX matters for sexual assault and harassment survivors at the K-12 and higher education levels, as well as far-reaching, multi-year programmatic monitoring and policy reform, the implementation of which Maha oversees. Maha is a lead author of ERA’s school and education district, campus and state policy models, including several large urban school district policies and administrative regulations, university board policies and Complaint investigation and resolution regulations, and California’s landmark SB 493. Devoted to the next generation of civil rights attorneys, Maha oversees and manages Equal Rights Advocates’ national law clerk program and has created a model program using the pivot to more advanced remote work systems during the COVID-19 era as an opportunity to expand access and the quality and intensity of experiential legal learning. Dedicated to experiential legal education and mentorship in a profession rooted in apprenticeship, Maha transformed Equal Rights Advocates’ Law Clerk program over a management period of 7 years, and now co-teaches an externship seminar at Berkeley Law. Maha is a graduate of UC Berkeley (undergraduate) and UCLA School of Law. She is a product of the opportunities afforded to first generation students through California’s Community College System, and was named 2022 Alumni of the Year of her alma mater (2002), Riverside Community College System.