Sara Pratt is Counsel at Relman Colfax. Sara joined the firm in 2015 after her retirement from the federal government. Her civil rights litigation practice focuses on challenges to institutional barriers to access to housing, lending, and insurance, and to policies and practices that discriminate and perpetuate segregation based on race, national origin and disability under federal civil rights laws.

At the firm, Sara has represented fair housing organizations and individual clients. She has developed and negotiated settlements in cases involving lending discrimination, redlining, housing accessibility, and rental discrimination, and is currently representing individuals with disabilities and five fair housing organizations in a lawsuit against a large regional developer. She also has served as an expert witness and consulting expert on a number of cases and has provided training for Congressional staffers, state fair housing organizations, landlords, city officials, and many others on fair housing and civil rights issues.

Prior to joining the firm, Sara was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing Enforcement and Programs and Senior Advisor to the Assistant Secretary at HUD. She directed HUD’s national civil rights enforcement efforts and led the development of regulations and policy guidance on numerous emerging civil rights issues, including the application of the Fair Housing Act to domestic violence in housing, criminal background criteria for housing, accessibility, the obligation to affirmatively further fair housing. She helped develop HUD’s final rules on harassment, discriminatory effects, affirmatively furthering fair housing, and the housing-for-older-persons exemption for familial status discrimination. She also led the negotiations for HUD that resulted in the settlement of HUD v. Associated Bank, the agency’s largest lending redlining settlement. She can be reached at spratt@relmanlaw.com.