Our Impact

We increase the number of skilled lawyers who can help community members navigate law and policy. 

We help community-rooted and base-building organizations improve their engagement with law and policy. 

We build legal infrastructure for and with social movements, such as networks, training tools, strategy committees, and leadership pipelines.

A group of people sitting at a long table with papers and other material, engaged in a discussion.

Since it’s founding in 2017, Movement Law Lab:

  • Built and advised national legal response networks for anti-eviction, voting rights, just transition, and global COVID racial equity campaigns, and more. For example:

    • The Eviction Defense Legal Network — created by MLL in 2020 to respond to the COVID-fueled housing crisis, mobilized and matched hundreds of lawyers to local tenant groups, and then shifted in 2022 into infrastructure for Right to the City Alliance, representing 100+ local groups.

    • The Global Network of Movement Lawyers, founded by 50 human rights advocates from 25+ countries to develop and deploy transformational and transnational law and policy strategies.

  • Trained 15,000+ lawyers, legal workers, law and policy community organizers, and students to date. 

    • More than 100 staffers from large legal organizations working in all 50 states + DC received custom training programs in 2022-2023 where they identified steps to transform organizational practice.

    • MLL’s 2022 Campaign Strategy School had 140+ lawyers and community organizers from 29 states, our 2023 ‘Negotiations Training had 170+ participants spanning from law students to seasoned lawyers, the 2022 “Politics and Purpose” class was attended by 560+ students from 113 law schools, and the 2020 Build Power Fight Power course for lawyers and legal workers had 4000+ participants. 

    • MLL created a 45-member Training Collective, the majority of whom were people of color and women/gender nonconforming, who share wisdom on lawyering approaches that center community power to advance equity.

  • Provided Fellowships and professional networks for dozens of community-based organizational leaders.

    • The 2018-2019 Legal Innovators Fellowship with Law for Black Lives invested in 15 leaders of law and policy organizations based in and serving Black communities in nine states plus D.C. 

    • MLL’s 2022-2023 Housing Fellowship supported 20 lawyers and community organizers from the US South to work on solving housing crises faced by low-income residents and communities of color.

Movement Law Lab helps local, national, and international community-rooted groups and lawyers to work together on high-impact strategies for equity and social justice. Movement Law Lab is led by women of color with a 10-person full-time staff in seven US states and Argentina, plus contractors and external collaborators. MLL’s training participants and strategy-development cohorts are generally majority people of color and women/gender nonconforming, prioritizing the expertise of marginalized backgrounds. With a lab structure, MLL has run pilot projects and experiments, produced rapid-response interventions, and incubated methods and programs for wider replication and adoption. MLL creates projects where advocates and organizers from low-income and racialized communities can build their skills for impact, dream together, strategize a better future, and disseminate stories that shift the narrative about the function of law in society.