Recap: Legal system webinar

An Overview of the March 2025 Understanding Ableism Webinar: “Disability Accessibility in the Legal System”

By Colin Wilfrid, AmeriCorps KCDC Coordinator

The second webinar in this year's Understanding Ableism series focused on accessibility in the legal system. Forty-eight guests attended on March 18, three times as many people as our February webinar.

This webinar had four Seattle-area panelists, and each of them had a different kind of experience with disability accessibility in the legal system.

Olivia Ortiz is an attorney at Northwest Justice Project who serves low-income people experiencing domestic violence. She experienced sex discrimination in college and was impressed with how her attorney managed to hold her college accountable. Ortiz became an attorney to implement the same sense of accountability as the representative of low-income people with similar experiences to hers. Ortiz has autism, and whenever she is arguing her side of a case, she asks for accommodations such as extra time to answer questions, a fidget toy and the ability to wait in the lobby before her case is called.

Elicia Tomason has dysautonomia, PTSD and ADHD. She got involved with the legal system because she faced housing discrimination. Tomason lived in five different apartment complexes over the past two and a half years, and none of her landlords were willing to let her break her lease. Tomason’s landlords wrote complaint letters to her, and while she wrote formal ADA complaints about their behavior, they still disregarded her complaints. Additionally, Tomason often waited for long periods of time for her documents to be filed, only to suddenly be asked to submit additional documents within an extremely short turnaround time.

Adrienne Stuart is an Assistant Attorney General for the Washington State Attorney General’s office. She works with the Department of Social and Health Services, and she focuses on disability policy with a particular focus on developmental disabilities. As someone who grew up poor, Stuart did not know much about the legal system until she began working at Planned Parenthood after college. Stuart’s business trip to Washington, DC, with Planned Parenthood in 2006 coincided with the retirement and replacement of a Supreme Court Justice, which helped her discover the legal system as a way in which she can help the disability community. Since then, Stuart has been able to point out obvious examples of ableism in the legal system. In one instance, an ASL interpreter was not booked for a case that involved a deaf individual, and the individual was not given a chance to state whether they were okay with their non-deaf parents having custody over them.

Alex Strout is a paralegal at Benefits Law Center, a law firm with a specialty in Social Security benefits. Strout had close family members who acquired disabilities later in their lives, and they relied on Social Security benefits to give them the income they needed to survive. Strout recently became a disability community member as well, after acquiring a chronic illness, giving him even more empathy with disability community members that struggle to receive Social Security benefits. Since Social Security does not always grant people’s accommodations, Benefits Law Center is dedicated to making sure their clients have what they need to advocate for their benefits. As a Benefits Law Center employee, Strout recalls many instances where he and his clients used the legal system as their Plan B.

As Ortiz, Tomason, Stuart and Strout discussed their experiences with accessibility in the legal system, some elements in each of their arguments were similar. For instance, all four panelists acknowledged the fear of asking for accommodations that many people with disabilities have. Another topic that each panelist made sure to point out was that efficiency is too high a priority for many legal workers without disabilities, as efforts to make case processing quicker contradict people with disabilities’ access needs. A common solution to these issues that all four panelists suggested was to increase legal workers’ awareness of what is going on within the disability community. They find this solution necessary because too many attorneys and judges are unaware of the evils of ableism and their impact on the disability community, because disability law is often left out of law school curriculum.

There are also ways the topics each of the panelists discussed were different from each other. For instance, each panelist had different experiences in the legal system that were impactful reinforcements of how ableist the legal system can be. Ortiz talked about how her disability intersected with her race in the cases she was involved with, such as when judicial officers developed negative bias based on her surname, as well as when a judge wondered why she was in the courtroom and thought she did not look like a lawyer. As someone without a job in the legal system, Tomason recalls being advised against taking her cases to court because of how much money she would lose as a result. To set the tone for her responses to the questions asked on this webinar, Stuart cited a definition of ableism attributed to disability rights advocate TL Lewis. Stuart uses Lewis’s definition of ableism because it points to the ways in which disability intersects with other marginalized identities. As someone who has not developed a disability until recently, Strout talked about how important it is to recognize that people with disabilities are their own experts on their experiences and needs. While his uncles’ Social Security benefits needs gave Strout a good idea of how he can help people who are in similar situations, his clients quite likely had different experiences and needs, giving him learning experience in his job at Benefits Law Center that became useful when he developed his chronic illness.

This Understanding Ableism webinar’s bottom line is that the legal system’s design does not currently account for the disability community. Too many lawyers are unaware of the fact that there are anti-ableism laws and cases they could learn about beforehand to defend their clients with disabilities, such as Section 504, the ADA and Olmstead. Too many judicial officers only think about themselves in terms of timing, as their fast-paced methods of facilitation do not work for people with disabilities who need to process what they are going to say. Too many law schools do not have disability law as part of their curriculum, leading to lawyers and judges not knowing what to expect when making sure cases involving people with disabilities have a fair ruling. However, Ortiz, Tomason, Stuart and Strout would not have guest-spoken on this webinar had it not been for the potential they saw in the disability community to advocate for a legal system that is more accommodating based on their needs. This webinar’s panelists know that the disability community is going through an era where the legal system treats them poorly together.

As long as the disability community sticks together in advocating for a less-ableist legal system, lawyers and judges will begin to see the disability community as people instead of “less than.”