A civil sexual assault case is about accountability and about what it costs a survivor to recover: therapy, medical care, lost work, and the harm itself. It is separate from the criminal process, which is run by a prosecutor and is not yours to control. A civil claim is yours. It can go forward whether or not you reported to police, whether or not charges were filed, and whether or not a criminal case ended in a conviction.
Lead attorney on every case we take, backed by a dedicated legal team you work with directly.
We represent survivors against the person who committed the assault and, where the facts support it, against an organization that enabled it: an employer that kept a known harasser on staff, a school or youth program that ignored complaints, a religious institution that moved someone rather than removing them, a property owner or business that disregarded an obvious risk. Institutional cases turn on what was known and what was done about it, so the records matter, and so does starting before they are gone.
What the first conversation is like
You call or write, and you say as much or as little as you want. There is no intake script and nobody is going to ask you to relive the assault in the first ten minutes. We will want to understand roughly what happened, roughly when, who else may have known, and whether you have already reported it anywhere. From that we can usually tell you whether there is a claim worth looking at, what the deadlines look like, and what the realistic next step is. It is free, it is confidential whether or not you hire us, and it ends whenever you want it to.
Privacy
Two different things are often meant by privacy here, and both are worth asking about. The first is confidentiality: everything you tell us is protected by attorney-client confidentiality from the first conversation, and we will not contact your employer, your school, or your family without your permission. The second is public exposure: courts in Pennsylvania and New Jersey can allow a survivor to proceed under initials or a pseudonym in some circumstances, and resolutions can carry confidentiality terms. What is available depends on the case, and we will tell you plainly before anything is filed.
Deadlines
Filing deadlines for these claims depend on how old you were, who is responsible, and which state's law applies, and Pennsylvania has revised them more than once in recent years. That means two things. Some claims people assume expired long ago have not, and some claims that feel recent are closer to a deadline than they look. Checking costs nothing.
We cannot promise a particular result in any case, and you should be careful of anyone who does. What we can tell you is what your options are, what each one would involve, and where your case actually stands at every point along the way.
