David Bateman, a lawyer at K&L Gates who spent his time “finding people who were doing bad things on the internet,” didn’t fully know the concept of revenge porn until he met Holly Jacobs.

Jacobs sought help from K&L Gates after explicit photos of her were nonconsensually shared on the internet. Jacobs’ case, Bateman says, made her “one of the first people who really made this a cause.”

“We had stumbled into a niche where there were an absolutely unlimited number of victims who had really no way of getting help from lawyers,” he says.

After this experience, Bateman co-founded the Cyber Civil Rights Legal Project in 2014, a pro bono initiative through K&L Gates aimed at helping victims of revenge porn.

In the 10 years since its launch, the project has amassed more than 400 volunteers across the firm’s 33 offices, helping thousands of victims across the United States, Europe, Australia and Asia. It provides legal advice, assists in removing content from websites, files lawsuits, and goes to trial on behalf of victims.

“We saw there was this incredible need,” Bateman notes. “And it was not such an obvious legal pro bono issue. It took some courage and vision for our firm to do it. But 10 years later, it’s still going on. It’s sort of remarkable.”

For one, getting the word out was initially difficult, and the biggest challenge was “getting victims to know that there was a place they could turn to.” The legal landscape has also drastically changed in the last decade. Today, almost every state has a revenge porn law, as well as a federal civil statute.

Though Bateman is proud of the project’s progress, more work must be done to fix the issue on a broader scale. Social problems aren’t solved by “lawyers doing lawsuits” or by enacting laws, he says. “It really is behavior that needs to change and needs to be taught so that it’s no longer acceptable to do. While we’re helping as many victims as we can, the larger impact of it has to be in getting people to change their behavior.”