Lady Justice Initiative

Employment is one of the most common sources of legal disputes globally and one of the areas where the gap between having a right and being able to enforce it is widest. HiiL’s Justice Dashboard research across 18 countries, puts annual employment disputes at more than 8 million. Non-payment of wages, sex discrimination, bullying, and sexual harassment are among the most reported problems. Fewer than 1 in 8 people facing an employment problem turns to courts or lawyers. (HiiL, 2021) The World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law 2026 found that while most economies have legislation on sexual harassment in employment, fewer than half have anti-harassment policies and measures for employers to adopt in the workplace. When it comes to equal pay, though most economies have a statutory equal pay requirement, almost 90% have no wage transparency measures in place to enforce it. (World Bank, 2026) In the UK, a high percent of women experience legal needs related to employment, yet many lack access to legal solutions: •       53% of young women reported experiencing workplace discrimination in 2024 (Young Women’s Trust, 2024). •       While 77% of mothers a negative or possibly discriminatory experience during pregnancy, maternity leave, or on return to work, 1% lodged a complaint with an employment tribunal. (Equality and Human Rights Commission, Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, 2016). •       Since 2012, the scope of employment-related matters eligible for civil legal aid has narrowed significantly. Even where employment law is nominally included, eligibility thresholds are so low that most women cannot qualify. In general, 85% of vulnerable women are unable to access civil legal aid (Women’s Budget Group, 2023). •       The statute of limitations for filing an employment tribunal claim is very brief (ACAS, Employment Tribunal Time Limits).  Timely access to qualified legal support is essential. Holly Rooney, Founder and CEO of yerty, is working to address these gaps in the UK by helping people understand their employment rights and options through tech. Watch as Holly shares the story behind Yerty⬇️ Checkout the sources in the comments to learn more about employment- related legal issues women face and their ability to access legal solutions. Justice Technology Association #womenbuildingjustice #justicetech #employmentjustice

Courts and judiciaries worldwide harbor some of the most entrenched, least-remediated bullying and harassment of women in any professional sector. Tenured judges, opaque complaint channels, career gatekeeping through references, and a culture of silence characterize many systems. The IBA’s landmark “US Too Survey” across 135 countries found that one in three women in the legal profession have been sexually harassed, and one in two bullied. Judicial workplaces showed the largest gender gap of any legal workplace type with a 47% point difference between the rates of bullying experienced by women and men, with women at 71% compared with men at 24%. The prevalence of sexual harassment in judicial workplaces was 23% above the mean among legal workplace types and more than double the law firm rate of 20% of women professionals. The research also found that respondents at judicial workplaces were most likely, among legal employer types, to never report their experience. Across jurisdictions, the picture is consistent: •       South Africa: The Under Pressure Magistrates’ Survey, 2024 found 16% of female magistrates reported being sexually harassed. Last year, Chief Justice Mandisa Maya introduced a judicial Sexual Harassment Policy, declaring “sexual harassment has no place in the halls of justice.” •       Globally: International Association of Women Judges research across 100+ countries reported the phenomenon “sextortion” —abuse of judicial power to extract sexual compliance. Its comparative studies of legal frameworks for prosecuting sextortion have driven reforms across multiple jurisdictions. In the U.S., federal court employees remain largely exempt from Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination and harassment — a structural gap that limits redress for those who experience it. This context is not only a problem for professionals working in justice institutions. The same cultures and power imbalances that women judges, lawyers, and clerks navigate daily, form the environment with which women seeking justice must interface. The dynamics compound: eroded legal rights, underrepresentation in the institutions that adjudicate those rights, and hostile conditions in those institutions constitute a system structurally stacked against women. Women professionals who have worked inside these systems bring vital insights and solutions with potential to transform how accountability, transparency, and access to justice functions in practice. Aliza Shatzman experienced judicial harassment firsthand and founded The Legal Accountability Project in direct response and built the infrastructure that didn’t exist—a Clerkships Database giving prospective clerks anonymous information on judicial work environments. Watch Aliza share her story in our latest #WomenBuildingJustice highlight. #womenbuildingjustice #justicetech

Globally, women own roughly a third of all small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) according to the World Bank. Part of the reason is structural. The World Bank’s 2026 Women, Business and the Law Report documents legal barriers to women’s entrepreneurship across 190 economies. In 91, laws do not prohibit discrimination against women in access to credit. In 2024, women-only founding teams received just 2.3% of global venture capital (PitchBook). In eight economies, women still need a husband’s permission to sign a contract or register a business. In addition, when women entrepreneurs need legal help to navigate or enforce their interests, they often cannot access it. Many legal systems were not built for small businesses or entrepreneurs. The UK Legal Services Board’s Small Business Legal Needs Survey — 10,000+ businesses — found one in three face a legal issue annually. Only one in four used professional help. Just 10% view lawyers as cost-effective; more than nine in ten believe it favors those with financial resources. The OECD found that SMEs and entrepreneurs make up over 90% of businesses yet face acute disadvantages navigating legal systems with limited resources. Unlike large companies they cannot absorb compliance costs or prolonged disputes. Unresolved legal issues lead to income loss and closure. For women entrepreneurs, the challenge are layered on top of other legal barriers as well as credit and capital gaps putting legal expenses simply out of reach for many. Tunisia illustrates the scale. SMEs are 97.4% of private enterprises. HiiL’s 2025 MSME Justice Survey found more than half faced a serious legal problem in two years. Only 20% resolved them. Without legal support, businesses make costly mistakes: HiiL found 76% of contract disputes arose from verbal agreements — deals made on trust, with no legal protection. With female-led SMEs making up only 10–14% of formal enterprise ownership the access to legal support essential to the success of their ventures risk undermining vital participation that affects their economic opportunity as well as economic growth. Accessible, affordable legal tools can change this equation and help women entrepreneurs protect their interests and grow. In Tunisia, Norchen Mezni, Founder and CEO of E-Tafakna is leading the way. Today’s #WomenBuildingJustice video features Norchen and E-Tafakna, which helps businesses and entrepreneurs in MENA access AI-powered contract creation and review, company formation, and HR solutions. ⬇️Watch the video to learn why Norchen is building E-Tafakna. ✅ Explore Norchen's profile on the Lady Justice Initiative + Justice Technology Association Women Building the Future of Justice Dashboard via the link in the comments. ✅See the comments to explore sources and learn more about this topic. ✅If you are using tech to help entrepreneurs and SMEs access legal solutions, please share in the comments! #WomenBuildingJustice #justicetech

"This CSW has once again shown us that the headwinds against gender equality and women’s rights are strong, but it has also reminded us that our shared resolve to advance women’s rights is stronger. And together we will continue to face those headwinds. UN Women’s unwavering commitment to gender equality and women’s empowerment and to our crucial triple mandate—will remain the unshakable ground on which we stand. Always." 💙 Read our Executive Director's full speech at the close of #CSW70: https://lnkd.in/eKnq57vf

The economic cost of divorce for women is not incidental. It is structural and persistent across decades of research. The University of Michigan found that all groups of women in the U.S. fared worse than men following marital disruption, with post-divorce poverty rates of 23% for White women, 35% for Black women, and 32% for Hispanic women, against 9%, 15%, and 16% for their male counterparts. The causes are structural: caregiving responsibilities, career sacrifice, and income loss that spousal support rarely compensates. They reflect systemic legal gaps and societal norms that sustain them. In divorce, most U.S. states operate under equitable distribution, a standard whose application varies. Jennifer Bennett Shinall, in the Cardozo Law Review, found that decision-makers consistently favored the male spouse regardless of economic role. The gap between what equitable distribution law says and what it delivers is not only a problem of legislative design. It is a problem of human judgment operating inside a formally neutral framework that can be deeply gendered in practice. Globally, the World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law 2026, covering 190 economies, found that the Marriage indicator scores 67 out of 100 on legal frameworks as written, but the supportive frameworks score, measuring whether the mechanisms exist to make those laws function, collapses to 47. Laws on paper; weak systems underneath. In much of the world, solutions are limited. Prenuptial agreements are unavailable, unenforceable, or legally prohibited. Where they are available, a prenup offers one practical option for navigating the unpredictability, subjectivity, and implementation gaps in statutory regimes. While not a guarantee, they offer a meaningful way to reduce exposure to the discretion that research shows consistently disadvantages women. A prenup can establish a contractual floor on spousal support, protect non-financial contributions to marriage, and specify how property is classified, reducing the scope for implicit bias in asset division. Though courts retain authority to enforce the agreements, for women navigating a system that is formally neutral and functionally unequal, a carefully negotiated prenup can offer a degree of certainty that default law may not. The access barrier has historically been decisive. A traditional prenup costs thousands of dollars depending on complexity. That price has effectively limited access to those with the financial resources to engage the traditional process. ✨Tech is now challenging the cost barrier and women are using it to design new solutions to meet more people's needs. Their leadership is materially shifting who has access to options for protecting their rights. Watch Liz Federowicz General Counsel First® discuss her work expanding access to modern prenuptial agreements. #womenbuildingjustice Justice Technology Association

The access to justice crisis is well known — more than 5 billion people have unmet justice needs globally, according to the WJP. What is less visible is how much harder it is for women to access justice. In nearly 70% of countries, women face greater barriers to justice than men, according to UN Women. And those barriers are structural, societal, and compounding. Last week, at the 70th UN Commission on the Status of Women, governments agreed to harness AI and digital justice to close these gaps. Built and managed responsibly, AI and technology hold immense potential to transform the current landscape. Together with the Justice Technology Association, we are taking action to capture this opportunity. We are launching the Women Building the Future of Justice Dashboard 1.0 — 161 women leaders across 27 countries at the forefront of justice tech, legal aid innovation, eco-system support, and AI transformation in the public sector. Much of the AI and tech attention and investment flowing into law is solving problems for those who already have access. Justice tech solves problems for those who do not. The leaders in the dashboard are using AI and technology to solve acute problems that existing systems, institutions, and solutions have not adequately addressed. The truth is most were not designed to meet women’s needs in the first place. Few women, if any, played a role in building them. The leaders in the dashboard are changing that. Many are working in areas of law that affect people’s lives most directly. Divorce. Gender-based violence. Employment discrimination. Immigration. Trusts and estates. The most effective solutions to complex legal problems come from people who have experienced them personally or seen them up close. Many of the leaders in the dashboard have seen first-hand or experienced injustices that alter lives: a woman who cannot leave a marriage because she has no property rights, a worker who cannot afford to challenge the employer who stole her wages, a survivor with no safe way to document what was done to her. Their own experiences as women in law equip them with unique understanding and bring empathy and humanity to their solution-making for all people. We need to do more to support and fund those doing this work. We also need more mission-driven problem solvers like them —individuals who put people first— thinking about and deploying AI in law to maximize its potential to help those in need. The structural barriers are real: opaque pathways to the field, limited infrastructure for public interest tech and AI and entrepreneurship, and gaps in access to finance for mission-focused, women-led ventures and nonprofits. These gaps create barriers where the work is most needed and at this pivotal moment in legal history. The dashboard is proof of what is possible. ✨Thank you Justice Technology Association for your partnership! See links below to: ✅Access dashboard ✅Submit/edit a profile #justicetech

UN research shows that women face greater barriers to accessing justice than men in 70% of countries. When left unresolved, women's legal needs compound — economic precarity tied to domestic violence or divorce, housing instability, lost inheritance, barriers to workplace protections, and more. 🚀Last week at the UN 70th Commission on the Status of Women, governments formally committed to using AI and technology to address this global access to justice crisis for women and girls. The good news: the leaders positioned to deliver solutions are already at work. Today, Lady Justice Initiative and Justice Technology Association are launching the #WomenBuildingJustice campaign. Featuring women justice tech leaders from around the world taking #Action and building the solutions people and governments are calling for, across family law, employment, gender-based violence, criminal justice, and more. We begin with family law. Women in some countries continue to face challenges in accessing divorce. For others, divorce and separation means adversarial lawyers, enormous costs, and a system that puts families last. NBER research found that easier access to divorce shifts power dynamics within marriages — even for couples who never divorce. The practical effects: lower-income couples are more likely to marry, women are more likely to enter the workforce, and rates of suicide, intimate partner violence, and murder all decline. And, earlier this year, an IAALS report called for adoption of holistic, non-adversarial processes highlighting benefits including conflict reduction following divorce, compliance with support, and better outcomes for children. Around the world justice tech entrepreneurs and public interest innovators are working to improve shortcomings and gaps in separation and divorce processes and to expand access to less adversarial alternatives to more people, Pip Wilson, Co-Founder and CEO of amicable is leading the way. Built from a co-founder's direct experience of a broken divorce system, amicable has helped more than 10,000 people separate with less conflict, less cost, and more dignity. ⬇️ Listen as Pip shares amicable's story. Like, follow, and share the campaign #womenbuildingjustice Highlight the justice tech builders you know with the hashtag #womenbuildingjustice Policy leaders, investors, and donors: support this vital work by helping amplify its leaders and with your resources! #womenbuildingjustice #CSW70 #justicetech #RightsJusticeAction

This Women's History Month, we keep coming back to one thought: the women shaping the AI transformation of law are not just navigating change — they are determining what the sector and profession becomes. That is a historic position to occupy. And it belongs to every woman in law working at this intersection, regardless of where she sits. It also demands a different kind of support than most executive development was built to provide. Legal professionals leading in the AI era of law are not short of conversation about transformation. The volume of conferences, research, and industry commentary is high. What is harder to find is the kind of strategic and tactical leadership insight essential to day-to-day navigation of a context that is both dynamic and genuinely novel. Because our goal is to power women in law in leading and benefiting from AI transformation, we have looked carefully at proven methodologies for delivering results-oriented support. We have also drawn on expertise in leading in fast and fluid environments where no one has a playbook for what that means for leadership and learning. What did the evidence point to?  The power of peers. Peers operating at the same level of complexity are a vital resource in times of change. And the peer advisory model — where small peer groups work in a structured format facilitated by a credentialed executive coach — is among the most evidence-based tools in executive and leadership development. Its value compounds when the peers share not just a domain, like law, but a specific, high-stakes moment inside it. These insights are the foundation of our response: Lex 2X Exec™ Executive Peer Advisory Group Coaching Circles for women in law. Each Circle brings together 6–8 women professionals, such as founders and CEOs, CLOs, AI officers, and public sector AI/ transformation leaders, and others in a structured, confidential advisory setting with a credentialed executive coach from our Global Corps. Circles operate under Chatham House Rules and are curated around shared leadership terrain. Current Circles focus on the following thematic areas: •AI Transformation & Governance (public and private sector) •Legal Tech founders and CEOs •Legal Tech CTO, GC, other senior roles •Legal Innovation If this resonates, join us for a 30-minute Information Session on March 13 from 12:00-12:30pm EST to learn about the Circles or request information directly via the links below. If you are a justice leader or entrepreneur, stay tuned for an announcement on new Circles for you! And, if you don't see a Circle that describes you or are interested in creating a customized circle for your organization, reach out to us to suggest one: LJI@ladyjusticeinitiative.org. Lady Justice Initiative #AIOpportunity4womeninlaw #AItransformation #Women'sHistoryMonth