Employment for the Disabled: Chicago-Kent Student Awarded Prestigious Skadden Fellowship

“You ought to be able to work a full-time job and know you’ll be able to have a warm home to go back to—a sanctuary to feed your family,” says Joseph Strom ’25. “That’s something that I think is just a very basic want of individuals and something that the law ought to be able to guarantee.”

Strom was recently chosen as a recipient of the prestigious Skadden Fellowship, a two-year fellowship that is offered to recent law school graduates who are pursuing public interest law projects.

“Skadden fellows address unmet civil legal needs of people living in poverty in the U.S.,” the foundation’s website reads. “They apply, having already designed their dream job and secured a strong host organization, which is the nonprofit that will supervise their work.”

Before applying for the fellowship, Strom designed a program to address discrimination against people with disabilities in the form of new technological barriers to securing and keeping meaningful employment, including denial of remote work, website accessibility, and artificial intelligence or other advanced software. He will work with Equip for Equality, a federally mandated legal aid organization that is dedicated to empowering individuals with disabilities in Illinois.

Strom previously worked with Equip for Equality in summer 2024 as a Public Interest Law Initiative-funded intern.

“I came to understand that there was sort of a newer area of discrimination that was occurring, that centered around emerging and newer technologies being used in the workplace,” he says. “Chicago-Kent Adjunct Professor and managing attorney at Equip for Equality Christopher Garcia and I saw that there was an increase in cases that the group was seeing regarding remote work, such as accessibility of remote work and remote work, specifically in the last year or so, being denied or being revoked as employers want to go more in person. [There is also a] need for website accessibility, because so often now people are using websites a whole lot more, whether they’re employed or whether they’re even just seeking a job application online.”

The rise in AI being utilized in these processes is also something that Strom intends to keep an eye on.

“A lot of employers are using AI processes to make decisions without necessarily understanding and being careful to de-bias those technologies so that they don’t accidentally screen out, filter, or otherwise harm disabled individuals in a range of different ways,” he says. “We need to be prepared so that disabled individuals are not left behind as the employment landscape changes.”

After looking at the data, Strom and Equip for Equality developed a goal to work toward: they want Illinois to be at the forefront of defending and expanding the rights of disabled employees and disabled individuals who are looking for work.

Strom’s intention is not punitive. He hopes to educate employers to help make them aware of potential issues and to help them find solutions that will ultimately help level the playing field for disabled workers.

“We want to really be focused on the needs and the desires of the client, and generally those needs and desires are to actually get the job,” he says, “and protracted litigation is not going to be very helpful for that, but we are willing and able to take cases to court, if the need should arise.”

Strom is excited to have this opportunity, because working in disability employment rights is his dream come true. Strom has been passionate about worker rights since he started his first job at a McDonald’s when he was 16.

As an undergraduate, he even worked toward unionizing one of his workplaces and learned how difficult the law can be to navigate. He also learned how important the workplace is in regard to an individual’s general well-being.

“We spend so much of our lives at work or working,” he says. “That work deserves to be a dignified experience, something where people go into work and they feel like they can be productive, that they can make some change, they can do something good.”

As Strom began pursuing employment law, he found out how often that was not the case.

He’s worked at the Plaintiff’s Employment Clinic at Chicago-Kent College of Law, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and in the Immigrants and Workers’ Rights practice group at Legal Aid Chicago, and he’s seen how bad conditions can be for workers.

“We talk about theft, we talk about crime, but the largest provider of theft in this country is employers, as far as wage violations go,” says Strom. “Maybe we see less overt and obvious discrimination as we did in the past, but it’s still there. It’s still present.”

The Skadden Foundation typically receives about 200 applications annually, but only funds 28 proposals. It’s not hard to see why Strom stood out.

He is currently president of the Kent Justice Foundation, Chicago-Kent’s dedicated public interest student group, vice president of the Hispanic Latinx Law Student Association, and a 3L representative of the Labor and Employment Law Society and for the Chicago-Kent chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. He’s also involved in the Christian Legal Society, as well as an active and winning member of the Moot Court Honor Society. He’s also spent all three of his years at Kent working as a student manager at Chicago-Kent’s Public Interest Center.

“Skadden is probably the most selective and therefore sometimes called the most prestigious one, particularly for public interest,” says Strom.

Strom is Chicago-Kent’s third Skadden fellow and the second to partner with Equip for Equality. Rachel Brady ’13 partnered with the organization for her fellowship. Militza Pagán ’17 was a Skadden fellow upon her graduation and Professor Carolyn Shapiro was also a Skadden fellow early in her career.