Skadden Fellow Jennifer Morgan ’26 on Helping Workers Exercise Their Rights
As part of her fellowship, which she will begin following her graduation from Columbia Law in May, Morgan will represent workers, especially women, seeking paid family leave benefits.
Growing up with a Swedish mom and living in Stockholm during high school, Jennifer Morgan ’26 came to appreciate Sweden’s social system, which provides generous paid parental leave for everyone.
Now, she wants to help workers in New York receive similar benefits.
“The values that I have from being half Swedish and living there made me feel very passionately about the rights that people ought to have,” Morgan says.
The Skadden Fellowship Foundation, which provides two-year fellowships to recent law graduates to pursue the practice of public interest law full-time, named Morgan a 2026 Skadden Fellow in December 2025. In the fall, she will begin her fellowship project at A Better Balance, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization based in New York City that focuses on workplace justice especially for women, caregivers, and people with health issues. There, Morgan will work to ensure access to temporary disability insurance and paid family leave benefits for pregnant, postpartum, and caregiving low-wage workers in New York.
Morgan describes the fellowship project as a “perfect melding” of her legal interests. “I wanted to do something at the intersection of employment law and gender justice,” she says. A Better Balance, co-founded in 2005 by Sherry Leiwant ’75, “felt like the perfect place for me to work, the sort of dream organization. And they happened to be looking for a fellow to do the kind of project I really wanted to do.”
A first-generation college and law student, Morgan says she chose Columbia Law after attending an admitted students event and learning about the Law School’s public interest community and the support it offers to students interested in public service careers. She became a Max Berger ’71 Public Interest/Public Service Fellow and credits the guidance of members of the Office of Public Interest/Public Service Law and Careers for help during the Skadden Fellowship application process. “I couldn’t have imagined going anywhere else and being able to sit here today and have this fellowship,” she says.
Morgan designed her project at A Better Balance to include direct representation of clients along with community outreach. She notes that New York’s paid family leave laws are relatively strong, but too often, workers either don’t know their rights to leave benefits or their employers deny them the benefit—either intentionally or because they don’t know the law. “The issue isn’t that the right [to paid leave] doesn’t exist,” says Morgan. “It’s that the access to it doesn’t exist, or doesn’t exist in the capacity that it should.” She also says that while New York City law guarantees the right to counsel for housing court, it does not do so for employment cases, “so I’m hoping to expand access to representation for as many people as possible by being just one more lawyer doing this sort of work.”
Through her Skadden Fellowship, Morgan will build on the experience she gained during her time at Columbia Law: She participated in externships at The Bronx Defenders and in the labor bureau of the New York State Attorney General’s Office; during her 1L summer, she represented low-income tenants at Manhattan Legal Services, and during her 2L summer, she worked in employment law at The Legal Aid Society.
Morgan’s experiential training revealed to her how much she enjoys direct representation, something she looks forward to continuing during her fellowship. “Employment and labor is where I feel I am the most passionate and strong advocate for clients,” Morgan says. “Probably the most important skill I’ve learned during law school is being able to be a good and compassionate listener. … I really want to make sure that I never become desensitized to how grave the issues clients face are, how important each individual experience is, and [the necessity of] being there for the client, not only as a lawyer, but as a human.”
