Published by Jewish Insider on 10/30/2025 Responding to historic levels of antisemitism in the U.S., the Anti-Defamation League and Gibson Dunn LLP announced on Wednesday a new joint network offering pro bono legal assistance to victims of antisemitic incidents. The new initiative joins an already crowded space of Jewish groups offering legal services, including the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, The Lawfare Project and StandWithUs. While leaders of those organizations told Jewish Insider they welcome the ADL’s new venture — and some already have plans to collaborate — the network appears to overlap with existing Jewish nonprofit work, though none with the scale of lawyers and firms the ADL is engaging. Called the ADL Legal Action Network, the antisemitism watchdog’s latest initiative will involve more than 40 law firms across the U.S., with more than 39,000 attorneys offering support as co-counsel and referral counsel to people who have experienced discrimination, intimidation, harassment, vandalism or violence on the basis of their Jewish identity. Victims will be instructed to submit information about their case online to be evaluated by a professional litigation team, which will assess whether the situation warrants free representation. The system leverages “cutting-edge AI technology to efficiently triage and route cases to the network of law firms and ADL’s national incident response infrastructure,” according to the ADL. Participating law firms include Cooley LLP; Covington & Burling LLP; Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP; Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP; and Arnold, Porter Kaye Scholer LLP. James Pasch, ADL’s vice president of litigation, told JI that the group will “continue to work with and refer cases to the Brandeis Center and several other organizations doing this important legal work, including serving as co-counsel on several cases.” Still, Pasch said that the launch of a platform to provide Jews “access to significant resources and some of the top legal minds in the country” is a unique approach, one that he said “has never existed before to fight back against antisemitism in the courts.” “We’re continuing to see historic levels of intake from a range of Jewish Americans, despite the ceasefire [in the Israel-Hamas war]. We’re seeing lots of activity, maybe not at the levels of a year ago, but certainly more than we’ve seen previously,” said Ken Marcus, founder of the Brandeis Center, which provides representation to Jewish students and employees nationwide. In February, the Brandeis Center established the Center for Legal Innovation — a team of nearly 20 lawyers and legal staff to litigate exclusively against antisemitism. “I’m pleased that there will be a new network in which to collaborate with,” Marcus told JI. In addition to the Brandeis Center, several other Jewish groups have been providing pro bono legal services to protect Jewish civil rights for years. “The Lawfare Project and the #EndJewHatred movement launched the Legal War Room nearly two years ago — long before today’s new initiatives — to create a global infrastructure for defending Jewish civil rights through coordinated, strategic litigation,” Gerard Filitti, senior counsel at The Lawfare Project, told JI. The Lawfare Project’s network has grown to more than 900 lawyers worldwide, according to the organization — significantly smaller than the new ADL network. “The Lawfare Project emphasizes strategic litigation and systemic reform more than scale, taking on high-profile, precedent-setting cases,” said Filitti. He continued, “It’s encouraging to see other organizations now adopting our model; it validates what The Lawfare Project proved first — that the rule of law is one of the most powerful tools to fight antisemitism.” Yael Lerman, director of the antisemitism education organization StandWithUs’ legal department, Saidoff Law, told JI that the group is “happy to see ADL is expanding into this area, in which we are witnessing an increase in reports of antisemitism to our intake hotline.” “The need for legal groups to address antisemitism in the community is growing and our work certainly reflects this, as does ADL’s new initiative,” she said, adding that “we anticipate partnering with them regularly in this new endeavor.” Lerman declined to elaborate on how Saidoff Law’s work differs from the new Legal Action Network. The legal network’s launch comes two years after ADL and Gibson Dunn teamed up with the Brandeis Center and Hillel International to respond to a rise of antisemitism on college campuses, following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks, by creating the Campus Antisemitism Legal Line, a free legal protection helpline for college students who have experienced antisemitism.