Lambda Legal Announces Hire of Two Senior Staff Attorneys Based in National Headquarters

(New York, April 5, 2013) — Today, Lambda Legal announced that Currey Cook and Karen Loewy have been hired as senior staff attorneys based in its national headquarters in New York.

"Currey Cook and Karen Loewy both have very impressive legal backgrounds and a long commitment to furthering civil rights. We are excited to welcome them to Lambda Legal," said Jon W. Davidson, Legal Director of Lambda Legal. "We look forward to having such experienced and talented litigators and advocates join our team to advance Lambda Legal's work."

"I am honored to join Lambda Legal and I look forward to contributing my skills to the very distinguished and highly accomplished legal team," said Currey Cook, Lambda Legal's Youth in Out-of-Home Care Senior Staff Attorney. "I am eager to focus my efforts on challenging discriminatory practices and reforming the public policies that affect primarily youth of color within child welfare, juvenile justice and systems of care for homeless youth throughout the country."

Before joining Lambda Legal, Cook was the Co-Director of the Bronx office of the Children's Law Center New York  (CLCNY), a non-profit law firm representing children in custody, visitation, guardianship, domestic violence, paternity and related child abuse and neglect proceedings in New York City Family Court, for three and a half years.   While at CLCNY, Cook led the organization's efforts to work more effectively with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) clients and their families and represented the organization on a NYC Family Court committee dedicated to addressing LGBTQ issues. Prior to his work at CLCNY, Cook served as a consultant to the National Juvenile Defender Center in Washington, D.C. and presented on the defender's role in reducing disproportionate minority representation in the juvenile justice system and other topics. In addition, he worked in Burundi on the American Bar Association's Rule of Law Initiative to assist with reintegrating former child soldiers into the community and, in 2009, served as a visiting professor for the Child Advocacy Clinic at Rutgers Law School Newark.  Before relocating to the New York City in 2009, Cook lived in Anchorage, Alaska and was an attorney with the Office of Public Advocacy for twelve years, where he represented youth in child welfare and juvenile delinquency cases and served as co-supervising attorney of the child advocacy section. Cook graduated from the University of Georgia with a B.A. in Journalism (Broadcast News) and was a radio reporter while in college. He received his law degree, cum laude, from Mercer University in 1994. While there, he served both as managing editor of the Mercer Law Review and Chief Justice of the Honor Court.

Karen Loewy will be focusing on the legal needs of LGBT people and those with HIV in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. and on the legal problems experienced by LGBT and HIV-positive seniors across the nation.

"I am thrilled to join the Lambda Legal team to continue to work on the front lines of the battle for civil rights for LGBT people," said Karen Loewy, Senior Staff Attorney at Lambda Legal. "I am honored to be a part of this work, and am especially excited to develop and expand our efforts on behalf of LGBT seniors and seniors living with HIV."

Previously, Loewy was a Senior Staff Attorney with Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD), where she engaged in LGBT impact litigation and policy work throughout New England for more than a decade. Her work spanned a wide range of matters on GLAD's docket, from establishing precedents under antidiscrimination laws to addressing harassment in schools; from navigating inequalities for LGBT parents to challenging unequal access to health care for transgender people and people living with HIV. She served as lead counsel in Hunter v. Rose, a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court custody case establishing the joint legal parentage of children born into same-sex spousal relationships, and O’Donnabhain v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, ensuring equal tax treatment for gender transition-related health care. Loewy was also a member of the legal teams that successfully litigated GLAD's marriage equality cases in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and played a central strategic role in the marriage equality effort in Rhode Island over many years, including successfully advocating for an Executive Order on marriage recognition. She received her J.D. from Fordham University School of Law, where she was a Stein Scholar for Public Interest Law and Ethics, and her B.A. from Brandeis University.