For Immediate Release
LOS ANGELES, April 6, 2026—Litigation nonprofit Social Justice Legal Foundation is now the Trial Impact Project, reflecting the organization’s focus on public interest trial litigation as a form of democratic participation. The nonprofit was founded in 2021 to develop civil rights and social impact cases and a pipeline of public interest lawyers to litigate them.
“Our focus has always been to advance civil rights through impact litigation,” said Sara Haji, Executive Director. “But the new name, ‘Trial Impact Project,’ directly reflects the value we try to add to communities who have historically been denied access to justice. We intentionally select cases with the potential to not only change the law but to tell a story, build a record, or change a narrative. And we’re training a generation of impact litigators to leverage every part of a case to make change.”
The Trial Impact Project’s initial docket of cases focused on challenging police practices, conditions of confinement, and the deprivation of civil rights and liberties in prisons, detention centers, and jails. This included two police misconduct cases with the ACLU of Louisiana’s Justice Lab and the Southern Poverty Law Center, as well as a major class-action case in federal court seeking accountability from a private prison and detention center operator that systematically poisoned immigrant detainees with toxic cleaning chemicals. It also includes a trial-ready case challenging the growing practice of digitizing and destroying inmate mail while making it electronically searchable, without a warrant, for years.
The Trial Impact Fellowship is a two-year intensive litigation training program for recent law school graduates committed to working in civil rights. Under the supervision of our senior staff attorneys, Trial Impact Fellows learn to litigate cases from inception through trial.
To learn more, visit our website www.trialimpact.org and follow us on social media:
Or contact:
Sherin Varghese
Senior Manager of Legal Operations
213-259-2509
media@trialimpact.org
