Ex-Boies Schiller Associate Launches Campaign to End Sexual Harassment
In the aftermath of allegations against Harvey Weinstein, former Boies Schiller Flexner associate Ally Coll Steele is using her experience at the firm to launch The Purple Campaign, which seeks to end sexual harassment in the workplace.
January 29, 2018 at 05:59 PM
5 minute read
Just a week after leaving her position as a litigation associate at Boies Schiller Flexner in Washington, D.C., Alexandra “Ally” Coll Steele announced her new gig in a piece she wrote for The Washington Post on Jan. 25.
In doing so, Steele added her voice to a growing chorus of women coming together to fight systemic workplace sexual harassment. Steele, in tandem with former London School of Economics and Political Science classmate Jessica Patterson, has now launched a new nonprofit called The Purple Campaign.
The idea to start such an organization came after The New Yorker reported that Boies Schiller chairman David Boies, a longtime legal adviser to former Harvey Weinstein, had contracted with former Israeli Mossad agents to derail publication of an article detailing the disgraced film mogul's decades of alleged predatory behavior.
Steele, who joined Boies Schiller in April 2017 following a stint as deputy national voter protection director for Hillary Clinton's ill-fated presidential campaign, said that the revelations about the firm's role in Weinstein's “Army of Spies” caused her and her colleagues in Boies Schiller's Washington, D.C., office to speak up about what had happened.
“I saw the firm come around to a lot of our suggestions,” Steele said about Boies Schiller, which earlier this month announced several changes in management.
But as 2017 came to a close, Steele began contemplating her next steps, as did Patterson, a technology industry executive based in the Bay Area. The two decided to launch The Purple Campaign with the assistance of Marc Elias, the chair of Perkins Coie's political law group, who met Steele in 2012 while working on Tim Kaine's successful campaign for a U.S. Senate seat in Virginia. (Kaine, a civil rights lawyer and Democrat who has co-sponsored a #MeToo-focused bill in Congress, was Clinton's pick for vice president in 2016.)
“The hope with this organization is really to bring that kind of discussion and change to other workplaces,” said Steele, daughter of Steve Coll, the current dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and niece of former Dewey & LeBoeuf partner Geoffrey Coll, now a litigation partner at Baker & Hostetler in New York. (Steele is also the niece of Foley Hoag litigation partner Jonathan Keselenko in Boston and the sister of Maxwell Coll, a Kirkland & Ellis litigation associate in San Francisco.)
The goal of The Purple Campaign is to organize people within various workplaces, as well as voters, to fight sexual harassment, Steele said.
“There isn't really a group doing issues-based advocacy or electoral advocacy or really a grassroots effort in nonprofits or companies,” Steele said. “So that's the hole that we're looking to fill.”
In addition to the advocacy component, The Purple Campaign will also roll out an educational element that will create three councils—a law and policy panel, a workforce and labor panel and a business and technology council—that will work to develop ideas and strategies for tackling sexual harassment.
“We plan to create these three councils of experts that will work together to really dig in and do some research and also start to understand the dynamics and challenges that different stakeholders are encountering,” Steele said.
And Big Law names have already signed up to assist. Former Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison partner Roberta Kaplan, who last year started her own firm and is co-heading with Buckley Sandler partner Christina “Tina” Tchen a new legal defense fund for the Time's Up initiative, has already joined The Purple Campaign's law and policy council.
While much of their plan has yet to be announced, The Purple Campaign's first advocacy initiative is to echo and support calls for members of Congress to wear black, a red pin or bring a guest who will raise awareness around the issue of sexual harassment to President Donald Trump's State of the Union speech on Tuesday.
“We just decided to amplify those three asks and use this as a moment to show lawmakers that we are here and we're going to ask them to act on this issue and take steps to demonstrate their commitment to working on it,” said Steele, a former legislative aide who has spoken previously about being groped by a former Democratic senator at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. “This really shouldn't be an issue that falls on partisan lines.”
And as for her former employer, after The Washington Post ran Steele's op-ed last week, she said that Boies Schiller name partners Boies and Jonathan Schiller shared the article across the firm, encouraging their lawyers to take a moment to read about the organization.
“[It] was both very nice to know that they were supportive of it, but also encouraging to me [to see] a bit of the change that we were able to make, in terms of the firm seeing this issue as a bigger thing than just their own involvement in Weinstein and their interest in being on the right side of this issue,” Steele said.
This content has been archived. It is available through our partners, LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law.
To view this content, please continue to their sites.
Not a Lexis Subscriber?
Subscribe Now
Not a Bloomberg Law Subscriber?
Subscribe Now
NOT FOR REPRINT
© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
You Might Like
View AllNewly Formed DEI Practices Expect Heightened Demand During Trump Administration
Many Lawyers Are Reeling From Election Results, but Leaders Are Staying Mum
6 minute readDavis Polk Launches European Restructuring Practice, Hires Sidley Duo in London
2 minute readTrending Stories
- 1HSF and Kramer Levin Leaders Set Out Merger Timeline, Structure
- 2'Don't Be Afraid to Dumb It Down': Top Fed Magistrate Judge Gives Tips on Explaining Complex Discovery Disputes
- 3Doctrine of ‘Practical Location,’ Breach of a Commercial Lease: This Week in Scott Mollen’s Realty Law Digest
- 4Supreme Court Asked to Review Issues of Secondary Liability for Copyright Infringement
- 5Defense Verdict: Alston & Bird Beat Back $35M Claim Against Nokia
Who Got The Work
Michael G. Bongiorno, Andrew Scott Dulberg and Elizabeth E. Driscoll from Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr have stepped in to represent Symbotic Inc., an A.I.-enabled technology platform that focuses on increasing supply chain efficiency, and other defendants in a pending shareholder derivative lawsuit. The case, filed Oct. 2 in Massachusetts District Court by the Brown Law Firm on behalf of Stephen Austen, accuses certain officers and directors of misleading investors in regard to Symbotic's potential for margin growth by failing to disclose that the company was not equipped to timely deploy its systems or manage expenses through project delays. The case, assigned to U.S. District Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton, is 1:24-cv-12522, Austen v. Cohen et al.
Who Got The Work
Edmund Polubinski and Marie Killmond of Davis Polk & Wardwell have entered appearances for data platform software development company MongoDB and other defendants in a pending shareholder derivative lawsuit. The action, filed Oct. 7 in New York Southern District Court by the Brown Law Firm, accuses the company's directors and/or officers of falsely expressing confidence in the company’s restructuring of its sales incentive plan and downplaying the severity of decreases in its upfront commitments. The case is 1:24-cv-07594, Roy v. Ittycheria et al.
Who Got The Work
Amy O. Bruchs and Kurt F. Ellison of Michael Best & Friedrich have entered appearances for Epic Systems Corp. in a pending employment discrimination lawsuit. The suit was filed Sept. 7 in Wisconsin Western District Court by Levine Eisberner LLC and Siri & Glimstad on behalf of a project manager who claims that he was wrongfully terminated after applying for a religious exemption to the defendant's COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The case, assigned to U.S. Magistrate Judge Anita Marie Boor, is 3:24-cv-00630, Secker, Nathan v. Epic Systems Corporation.
Who Got The Work
David X. Sullivan, Thomas J. Finn and Gregory A. Hall from McCarter & English have entered appearances for Sunrun Installation Services in a pending civil rights lawsuit. The complaint was filed Sept. 4 in Connecticut District Court by attorney Robert M. Berke on behalf of former employee George Edward Steins, who was arrested and charged with employing an unregistered home improvement salesperson. The complaint alleges that had Sunrun informed the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection that the plaintiff's employment had ended in 2017 and that he no longer held Sunrun's home improvement contractor license, he would not have been hit with charges, which were dismissed in May 2024. The case, assigned to U.S. District Judge Jeffrey A. Meyer, is 3:24-cv-01423, Steins v. Sunrun, Inc. et al.
Who Got The Work
Greenberg Traurig shareholder Joshua L. Raskin has entered an appearance for boohoo.com UK Ltd. in a pending patent infringement lawsuit. The suit, filed Sept. 3 in Texas Eastern District Court by Rozier Hardt McDonough on behalf of Alto Dynamics, asserts five patents related to an online shopping platform. The case, assigned to U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap, is 2:24-cv-00719, Alto Dynamics, LLC v. boohoo.com UK Limited.
Featured Firms
Law Offices of Gary Martin Hays & Associates, P.C.
(470) 294-1674
Law Offices of Mark E. Salomone
(857) 444-6468
Smith & Hassler
(713) 739-1250