Debra Katz–Lisa Banks law partnership

Debra Katz–Lisa Banks law partnership is both a professional collaboration and a close personal friendship: Katz and Banks are law partners, and Banks is Katz’s best friend outside the office. Their partnership brought together Katz’s forceful, activist approach to civil-rights law and Banks’s cooler, persistent manner. Together, they represented people bringing harassment claims while also trying to widen the space for those claims to be heard and addressed.

Complementary lawyers

Katz had begun her career as a junior member of the legal team preparing the first sexual-harassment case heard by the Supreme Court, Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson. In 1986, the Court ruled unanimously for the bank teller who said her manager had repeatedly assaulted her and threatened to fire her if she did not comply, establishing sexual harassment as a form of discrimination. Decades later, Katz remained committed to civil-rights advocacy, negotiating on behalf of employees who felt wronged.

Banks brought a contrasting presence to the partnership. She was described as cool and impassive with adversaries, with a perseverance that reached back to childhood: at seven, she was told that she could never play for the Boston Red Sox because she was a girl. The account presents these differences not as a division of purpose but as complementary qualities within a shared legal practice.

A practice shaped by secrecy and a rare opening

For much of their careers, Katz and Banks saw harassment and abuse cases recur while broader progress seemed stalled. They had won awards for individual women, sometimes substantial ones, often through confidential settlements. They regarded those settlements as imperfect but sometimes necessary tools. The wider legal landscape helps explain that tension: people might settle because they needed money, wanted privacy, saw few alternatives, or hoped to move on, while federal protections left some workers outside their reach and imposed short filing deadlines and limits on damages.

The Weinstein case changed the conditions in which the partners worked. In the months after the reporting, Katz said her clients’ complaints were being taken more seriously. She represented Capitol Hill staffers whose harassment complaints led to the resignations of a House member and a senior congressional staffer. Katz and Banks also filed a lawsuit against a Washington-area celebrity chef; his partners eventually left, and his business empire dissolved. They met with representatives of Congress and state legislatures to press for stronger protections. The pair felt the moment offered an unusual opportunity for change, but worried that backlash could close it.

Representing Christine Blasey Ford

That sense of urgency carried into the partners’ meeting with Christine Blasey Ford. After Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office referred Ford to Katz and Banks, the lawyers arranged to meet her at a hotel near the Baltimore airport. They had already considered, in general terms, what might be done about an old sexual-assault allegation, and had heard the broad outline of Ford’s account without knowing her identity.

After several hours with Ford, both lawyers considered her credible and were moved by what she described as a sense of civic duty. They also thought she seemed unaware of the possible consequences of the letter she had sent to Feinstein. If it became public, Ford would need protection; if it did not, she would need counsel in deciding whether and how to proceed. Katz and Banks wanted to represent her and do so without charge.

During the negotiations over Ford’s testimony, Ricki Seidman was to shape the team’s terms behind the scenes, while Katz and Banks negotiated directly with the staff of Chuck Grassley. The account thus shows the partnership operating alongside other advisers, with the lawyers handling negotiations as Ford’s public role—and the stakes of her letter—grew.

Shared advocacy beyond the courtroom

The partnership’s work joined individual legal representation to a broader effort to change how harassment complaints were treated. Katz and Banks pursued cases, met with lawmakers, and sought reforms while recognizing that confidential settlements could offer clients practical help and still leave the wider pattern hidden. Their experience made that contradiction part of their work: achieving a result for one person did not necessarily make the system more transparent or prevent similar complaints from recurring.

Their collaboration also belongs to a larger movement in which people with sharply different resources and public standing began to speak and organize. At a later gathering, low-paid McDonald’s worker Kim Lawson described filing a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and leading a strike, while former Miramax employee Zelda Perkins spoke about challenging confidentiality agreements. Those accounts show the range of risks and routes to public action in the post-Weinstein period. Katz and Banks’s partnership worked within that changing landscape, combining legal advocacy with the effort to make complaints harder to dismiss and reform harder to postpone.