Lauren Barnes Named Acting CEO of Public Justice
When Lauren Barnes was first asked to join the Public Justice Board of Directors, she wasn’t ready to take on anything new — not with a busy career and a blooming family.
“I had been asked to join the Board several times,” she said. “But I didn’t want to come in and join a board if I didn’t have the bandwidth to be active — I’m not a ‘just put it on my resume’ kind of gal.”
Having been on the organization’s Class Action Preservation Project (CAPP) committee for many years, she was well aware of the work Public Justice does, both in the class action space and in the greater civil rights litigation landscape. But what she didn’t know was that finally saying “yes” in 2018 would lead to more than just a seat on the Board — it would lead to Lauren becoming Public Justice’s acting CEO.
“The thing that got me on the Board was a conversation with [former Public Justice attorney] Matt Wessler and [Past President] Beth Terrell; they sat down with me and talked about the great community of people serving,” Barnes said. “Those perfect little pushes often come at times when you’re already thinking, ‘Maybe this is the thing that I’m ready for now.’ It was the prod I needed, and I’m so grateful to them because it was definitely the right choice for me to join.”
Rising to meet the moment seems to be a theme in her career. After college, Barnes connected with Conflict Management Group, an offshoot of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Through their work, she came to enjoy international conflict resolution work that she and her colleagues were doing.
“The people that I thought were doing the most interesting jobs or had the most interesting backgrounds and work were people that all had a law degree,” she said. “I thought at that point, ‘If this is what I want to do, this is the language that I need to be able to speak, so I’ll go to law school and jump right back into this work.’”
Barnes applied to law school with the goal of returning to the nonprofit world. But during her application process, she was introduced to Tom Sobol (who would go on to serve as Public Justice Board President in 2022-2023) and found his work on plaintiff-side litigation inspirational.
She thought she would “try it out for a summer,” so in her first year of law school, Barnes started working at Sobol’s Boston-based law firm, Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP — and she didn’t leave for 21 years. There, she was a partner and management committee member, and her legal work focused primarily on class actions in pharmaceutical cases and eventually, pharmaceutical antitrust work.
After her two decades with the firm, Barnes decided to take a step back — and assess the boards on which she wanted to serve. Once again, Public Justice called, and Barnes answered.
“Just as I was planning to start a sabbatical, I got some outreach from people about running to become an officer at Public Justice. And as crazy as it sounded at the time, as much as I was pulling back from some things to give me some space and breathing room, I thought, ‘This resonates. This feels right. This is where my heart is.’ So I took the leap. And I’m really glad I did,” she recalled.
After her election as an Officer of the Board, she was recently called to help out in another critical way, too. In November 2025, Barnes was named acting CEO of the organization. And it’s not a role she takes lightly.
“I have such tremendous respect for the people that work at Public Justice, for the team that make up the heart and soul of the organization, and for taking the craft that I had practiced for many years as a litigator and using that as a tool for effecting systemic change.”
As she steps into this leadership role and becomes a bridge between the staff she admires and the Board she has known and worked with for years, Barnes said she already has goals for herself during her time as acting CEO.
“I am already thinking about what this next phase of growth for the organization looks like,” she said. “We have this really amazing work that we’re doing, and I want to make sure that people know about and understand it. When we connect with the community in that way, they get excited about the work and the possibilities, because everything that we’re doing in each of the Public Justice projects has the potential for wide-ranging positive change in the world that we really need to see.”
In a time in United States history where politics are preying on people’s protections and rights, Barnes said she sees Public Justice playing a critical role in meeting our political climate where it is and challenging it at every turn.
And if someone can speak to meeting the moment, it’s Lauren.
“We have to marry ‘meeting the moment’ that we are in with the work that we’ve built such an expertise in and that needs to continue, particularly now when government and corporate abuses are rampant,” she said. “We have to be able to do both, because when people learn about what we do, they love it. They are inspired by it. And goodness knows, the world needs more of that right now.”