After New York's Adult Survivors Act was signed six months ago, phones at the national law firm Slater Slater Schulman blew up from other lawyers stating they had clients in need of representation for past allegations of sex assaults in women's prisons.

"Once we identified the magnitude of this problem," said Adam Slater, the firm's founding partner, "we started putting it out there that we are handling these types of cases—and the response was overwhelming. That's because sexual abuse in prisons over the last few decades is an epidemic. It's a systemic problem."

Slater, whose firm represented survivors of sex abuse around the country in cases against the Boy Scouts of America, the Catholic Church and other institutions, has now teamed with national civil rights attorney Ben Crump—and the tandem is set to file a series of claims under the Adult Survivors Act on behalf of at least 750 alleged victims connected to dozens of New York prisons and jails.

The majority of claims are within the former Bayview Correctional Facility, a medium-security women's prison in Manhattan that closed in 2012 after it sustained damage from Hurricane Sandy, and Albion Correctional Facility in Orleans County.

The cases will be tried individually, not as a class action, mostly in the New York Court of Claims, Crump and Slater said during a conference call.

The law, which takes effect on Thanksgiving Day, establishes a one-year window for victims who

were at least 18 at the time of the sex crime, and for which the statute of limitations previously expired.

Crump, whose firm represented many of the victims of the former MacLaren Children's Center scandal, a juvenile detention facility in Los Angeles, called Slater's firm the nation's leader "at least in my estimation" when it comes to fighting for victims of sex assault and rape in America.

"When we think about that aspect of it," said Crump, who's worked with Slater previously, "Black and brown people have bathed in a legal system that has often betrayed them. And so that's why we've been so successful, I think, in not only attracting clients, but having institutions like the prisons and corporations, not devalue the cases of Black and brown people, and that becomes a crucial issue here."

In many respects, it's a continuation of the #MeToo movement, which Crump said exploded from claims by women of affluence, "but not a lot of marginalized women."

Asked about the nature of their representation, Crump said, "We never charge our clients anything unless we recover for them. This obviously is going to be challenging—that they were preyed upon, because it was believed that nobody in society would believe these Black and Hispanic women.

"And so that's the lift that we know we're going to have to bear," Crump said. "But we are committed to finally being able to have these women get a measure of justice, and know that their lives matter."

In one claim, a Black woman said she told a female guard she had been raped by a male guard, and was allegedly told, "Never tell anybody that you told me that," according to Crump.

That inmate was then relegated to solitary confinement, the lawyer said.

"That goes into the extreme power dynamic that exists in prisons," Slater said. "That's why, under the law, a prisoner can never consent to sex under the penal code… These guards controlled every aspect of these women's lives, including potentially getting out at some point, seeing their families, everything you could think of."

Slater said he expects the number of claims to increase considering "these are the forgotten women of society who were neglected, even though the state knew about this as early as the 1980s."