Ally Coll is a lawyer and nationally recognized expert, thought leader, writer, and public speaker on the #MeToo movement and gender equality in the workplace. Her writing on legal and workplace issues has been published in the Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, the Harvard Journal on Legislation, The Hill, and Jezebel.
Before law school, Coll worked for several years in electoral politics and in Congress. From 2007 to 2008, she was an organizer on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, Nebraska, and Ohio. In 2010, she was the statewide Field Director for U.S. Senator Patty Murray’s (D-WA) successful re-election campaign. In 2011, she became Senator Murray’s Political Director and U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell’s (D-WA) statewide Finance Director. In 2012, Coll was the statewide Field and Voter Protection Director on U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA)’s successful bid for the U.S. Senate. She served as Press Secretary on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee before leaving Capitol Hill to attend law school.
Coll received her law degree magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2016, where she served on the Board of the Harvard Women’s Law Association and as the Executive Policy Editor of the Harvard Law and Policy Review. She was a 2018 alumni recipient of the Harvard Women’s Law Association’s “Shatter the Ceiling” award. She recently served as a consultant for the 2018 major motion picture On the Basis of Sex, a biopic film about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s early legal career and her efforts to found the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU.
After graduation, Coll joined the legal department of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in the Brooklyn headquarters. As the campaign’s Deputy Voter Protection Director, she managed the campaign’s volunteer lawyer program, national voter assistance hotline, and oversaw Election Day legal operations in the battleground states. After the election, Coll worked as Elections Counsel on the U.S. House Administration Committee before joining the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner LLP as a litigation associate in April 2017.
Coll had been working at Boies Schiller for about six months when the New Yorker revealed that the firm had retained Israeli intelligence operatives to spy on the women coming forward with their stories about Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. Coll—who had just shared her own #MeToo story in the Washington Post a week earlier—took on a leadership role internally to advocate for specific steps the firm should take in response. A few months later, she left Boies Schiller to launch the Purple Campaign, writing about her decision in an OpEd in the Washington Post on January 25, 2018 titled “Why I left my corporate legal job to work full-time on #MeToo.”
