Sharon McGowan is chief strategy officer and legal director at Lambda Legal, the oldest and largest LGBT legal group in the country, where she heads up a team of nearly three dozen lawyers. Before that, she served as deputy director of appellate litigation at the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, where she developed the arguments that led the United States to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act, as well as the arguments put forth on the merits in the Windsor and Obergefell cases.