We are thrilled to announce that longtime WLP Managing Attorney Terry L. Fromson has been honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award, a distinguished accolade bestowed by the Pennsylvania Legal Awards in honor of career-long professional excellence in the legal community.
“Terry’s brilliant legal mind, tenacious focus, and devotion to gender justice drive her ability to investigate a client’s experience, find the genesis of discrimination, and dismantle the problem at the root,” says WLP interim co-executive director Amal Bass. “As we congratulate Terry for earning this Lifetime Achievement Award, we also thank her for her generous spirit as a colleague and mentor to young lawyers.”
Fromson has devoted her entire career to public interest law, has led significant progress toward gender justice and equality both locally and nationally. Since joining WLP in 1994, she has brought impact litigation, engaged in direct representation, and successfully pursued institutional and policy changes that serve to protect and advance the legal status of women, girls, and LGTBQ+ people in Pennsylvania and beyond. She has worked across a broad range of inter-related issues including domestic violence, pregnancy and lactation discrimination, equal pay, sexual harassment, Title IX, and LGBTQIA+ rights, and worked to improve rape laws and police accountability in responding to sexual assault.
“Terry took on the insurance industry virtually single-handedly and won the passage of state and federal laws protecting domestic violence survivors from discriminatory rating and underwriting practices,” says WLP interim co-executive director Susan J. Frietsche. “She is a model of relentless, effective advocacy, and I am so lucky to have had the chance to learn from her.”
Notable accomplishments include leading a national effort to stop insurance companies from discriminating against victims of domestic violence, co-developing a “gold standard” advocate-led review of police files to improve justice for sexual assault survivors with former WLP Executive Director Carol Tracy and, as an extension of that project, working with Tracy and advocates on a successful decade-long campaign calling on the FBI to update the UCR definition of rape for the first time since 1929.
Fromson recently reflected on her storied career in the Legal Intelligencer. “Overall, I have thrived by working in close collaboration with both colleagues and clients, whose courage in coming forward has always been the key cog in the wheel of a larger public interest system that, no matter what, keeps churning toward progress and moving us closer to an equitable, fairer society.”
Fromson will be presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Pennsylvania Legal Awards 2023 in Philadelphia on June 14. Congratulations to all honorees!
Women’s Law Project is a non-profit public interest law center in Pennsylvania devoted to advancing and defending the rights of women, girls, and LGBTQ+ people in Pennsylvania and beyond.
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