Full-Length Profile of Jeffrey Mandel (Chicago ’06)

An Unanticipated Career Path

Jeffrey Mandell (Chicago, ‘06) is the co-founder and general counsel of Law Forward, a nonprofit, impact-litigation firm that litigates to promote voting rights and democracy in Wisconsin.

Jeff’s career path did not turn out as he initially planned, as he never intended to pursue traditional legal practice. “I went to law school with the idea that I was going to do policy work and maybe teach,” Jeff said. “Practicing law was not in my mind.”

His first-year law school classes, as well as informal gatherings of Chicago’s Tony Patiño Fellowship community, altered Jeff’s view of what legal practice could achieve.

“I was interested in effecting change and making the world better. Through the Fellowship, I began to appreciate the degree to which litigators could do those things.”

Starting Out in Private Legal Practice

After law school, Jeff clerked for the Honorable A. Raymond Randolph of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Jeff became drawn to the potential of impact litigation for improving policies.

“With litigation, we get answers. You take a case to court, and it works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, then you think about what you’ve learned and determine whether there’s another way to go about it. I like that intellectual challenge.”

Following his clerkship, Jeff worked in private practice at Barlit Beck, a Chicago trial litigation boutique. Later, he joined Jones Day as an appellate specialist.

In 2015, Jeff and his family moved from Washington, D.C. to Madison, Wisconsin. “One thing that drew us to Madison was our belief that we could raise our kids in a place that reflected our values. When we got here, we found that Wisconsin is indeed a lovely place, but some of its political trends were disturbing.”

Jeff became focused on addressing what he saw as an anti-democratic drift in Wisconsin politics. He established a Madison chapter of the American Constitution Society, an organization with which he was involved during law school. “I thought Madison needed a place for lawyers who shared ideals about how the law should work to get together to discuss and inspire each other and push ourselves to do more,” Jeff said.

“When you think about progressive or conservative changes in the law — the Civil Rights movement, or the women’s rights efforts that Justice Ginsburg led when she was at the ACLU, the redefinition of the Second Amendment into an individual right over the last 20 years, the change of the First Amendment and religious liberty, or gay rights — those changes usually come about through slow steps in the law,” said Jeff. “I thought we needed a place where people could come together to strategize and create a vision for how we were going to change the law in Wisconsin across time.”

Filing the First Case and Establishing Law Forward

Conversations with American Constitution Society colleagues eventually prompted action in early 2019, when Jeff filed a lawsuit on behalf of the League of Women Voters.

In November 2018, Wisconsin voters had elected Democrats to all the statewide offices, including Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General and Treasurer. In response, the Wisconsin legislature — which included many officials elected from highly gerrymandered districts — convened a lame-duck session and passed laws arrogating to itself important powers traditionally exercised by the Governor and the Attorney General.

“This horrified me,” Jeff explains. “The legislature passed laws that took away significant parts of the power that people had elected the Governor and the Attorney General to exercise.” Jeff teamed with the League of Women Voters, Disability Rights Wisconsin, and other organizations to file a lawsuit claiming the new laws violated the state constitution.

In 2019, Jeff, along with friend and co-founder Doug Poland, established Law Forward, with the “hypothesis that Wisconsin is, for a combination of reasons, the testing ground for the most radical, anti-democratic policies in the U.S., and we were at least a decade behind in responding.” Law Forward’s charge was to prevent these policies from taking deeper root and spreading.  As they built the organization, Jeff and Doug continued to practice at their law firm, Stafford Rosenbaum LLP, while simultaneously fundraising for Law Forward and working on its cases. Law Forward hired a full-time staff attorney and launched with the arrangement that Stafford Rosenbaum would co-counsel Law Forward’s cases on a low bono basis.

While working on the lawsuit, Jeff connected with others who shared his vision, including lawyers in private firms willing to provide pro bono and low bono support. The ability to leverage top-notch legal resources while keeping expenses low in the beginning helped establish Law Forward and enable it to achieve important early wins.

Fighting the Gerrymander to Achieve Fair Election Maps in Wisconsin 

For over a decade, Wisconsin state legislative voting maps showed the most extreme partisan gerrymandering of any in the country. In 2018, although Democrats swept statewide offices and won 54% of all the votes for the legislature, those 54% of the votes translated into just 36% of the seats. Even with the majority voting for Democratic control, Republicans in Wisconsin held a near supermajority in the legislature. Despite the election of Democratic Governor Tony Evers that year, the legislature verged on being able to overturn any veto.

“The gerrymander was so effectively designed that it rendered the voice of the voters largely irrelevant in the state of Wisconsin,” said Jeff. “This isn’t the way democracy should work.”

Jeff noted that prior to the 2020 election, no one envisioned how intense the attack on democracy would become. “The election was pivotal because the redistricting that would immediately follow would be vital to determining people’s voting rights.”

In the 2020 presidential election, almost 3.3 million Wisconsinites voted—a record turnout that saw Joe Biden win the state and Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes. Yet the Trump campaign and the Republican Party of Wisconsin developed a scheme to use fraudulent electors to overturn the results.

“Ten individuals — the fake electors — decided they didn’t care what 3.3 million Wisconsinites wanted and attempted to substitute their own judgment. It’s such a radical concept that litigating it was challenging because no statute said, ‘you can’t do this.’ No one had ever thought to do it, so no one had ever thought to say you can’t do it.”

Law Forward, working with Stafford Rosenbaum LLP and the Institute for Constitutional Accountability and the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, sued the 10 fraudulent electors and two lawyers who facilitated the scheme (Penebaker v. Hitt). This first-in-the-nation lawsuit resulted in separate historic settlements in 2023 and 2024. The settlements allowed Law Forward to publicly release previously unknown discovery materials revealing how the scheme unfolded.  The materials also showed that the plan that started in Wisconsin extended to a half dozen other states and provided the foundations for the January 6 insurrection.

In August 2023, Law Forward, with Stafford Rosenbaum, the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, Campaign Legal Center, and Arnold & Porter, filed a petition to the Supreme Court of Wisconsin to challenge the state’s political districting (Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission). “The gerrymandered maps have divided our communities, preventing fair representation. This has eroded confidence in our political system, suppressed competitive elections, skewed policy outcomes, and undermined democratic representation,” Jeff stated in the announcement of the challenge.

In December 2023, the Wisconsin Supreme Court sided with the petitioners, holding that the gerrymandered maps were unconstitutional and that no future elections could be held using them. After months of back-and-forth, the Wisconsin legislature adopted new maps drawn by the office of Governor Tony Evers, which he signed into law in February 2024. For the first time in over a decade, Wisconsinites will vote this fall under fair maps.

Dedicating the Full Docket to Democracy Litigation

Jeff says that much work remains to safeguard democracy in Wisconsin. Looking ahead, priority issues for Law Forward include protecting the right to vote, rebalancing power among the separate branches of Wisconsin government, and ensuring consistent election administration in Wisconsin.

With the most decentralized election administration system in the country, the state runs elections at the municipal level and has an eye-popping 1,850 municipal clerks who run their own election. The result is that, while Wisconsin represents a relatively small share of the U.S. population, one out of every six election officials in the country are in Wisconsin.

“It’s important to ensure that all of those elections around the state are run not only well and efficiently but also equally,” said Jeff. “If people live a few blocks apart in two different municipalities, they should have the same voting rights, and municipal boundaries shouldn’t change that. Law Forward will continue to focus on this issue.”

Law Forward also plans to address “hangover effects” of the gerrymander. “While the legislature promoted gerrymandering, it also arrogated to itself an outsized degree of power. Right-sizing that in Wisconsin by rebalancing the three branches of government, and generally making sure that democracy works as intended in Wisconsin, will take time.”

Jeff transitioned from Stafford Rosenbaum LLP to lead counsel at Law Forward in 2024. He leads a team of five full-time attorneys and manages the organization’s collaborations with national co-counsel, including Protect Democracy, States United Democracy Center, Campaign Legal Center, Fair Election Center, Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, among others.

A Carrer Path Unanticipated but Consistent with Its Beginnings

Jeff’s career illustrates the opportunities for lawyers to make a lasting impact through litigation. He encourages attorneys to explore different areas of law, noting that his experience as a commercial litigator has made him a better democracy litigator and vice versa.

“Seemingly disparate threads connect one area of the law to another in ways that you wouldn’t predict,” Jeff notes. “One of the amazing things about being a lawyer is that you can keep reinventing yourself.”

For those seeking to explore new legal domains or litigate as co-counsel, Jeff encourages getting involved with organizations that align with their interests, such as the American Constitution Society, the Federalist Society, or issue-focused legal advocacy groups. Engaging with such groups offers an opportunity to learn about new areas of law and to participate in meaningful litigation.

Law Forward’s fellowship program for early career attorneys offers an opportunity to become a full member of the team for two years and to learn about Law Forward’s democracy litigation.

Reflecting on his journey, Jeff said that Law Forward’s mission resonates with the values of the Tony Patiño Fellowship, where Jeff first realized the impact that litigators can have.

“It feels very much in line with the goals and values of the Patiño Fellowship that I found a way, more than 20 years after my Patiño Selection Day interview, to litigate in a small-team environment where I work closely with and mentor younger attorneys, while solving problems at the cutting edge of what is happening in Wisconsin and across the United States.”