8 Ways to Create a More Client-Centric Mindset at Your Law Firm

Tuesday, June 6, 2023

A law firm’s most precious assets are its clients, which are the source of both today’s business and tomorrow’s referrals.

Therefore, you’d think that firms would strive to integrate the voice of their clients into all they do.

Unfortunately, many law firms fail to adopt a client-centric mindset as they engage with their clients and prospects, which often leads to what I call lots of “random acts of marketing.”

The fundamental and critical elements of business development success include forming strong online and in-person relationships, and providing exceptional client service at all times.

Clients want to hire lawyers who make them feel good about themselves and who make them look good, both inside and outside their organizations.

As a legal marketing professional, your job is to assist lawyers to identify ways in which your firm can add value to a client/contact and solve an issue that they have or better yet, will have. This type of dedicated and proactive client service will enable your firm to be an exceptional legal service provider, and—if successful – to be viewed also as a trusted business advisor.

Here are eight ways to adopt a more client-centric mindset at your firm: 

1. Ask your clients for feedback – Many lawyers don’t open the door to feedback because they’re afraid of what they might hear. Huge mistake! Asking clients how you’re doing and what you could do better (or more efficiently or differently) should be a given. How else will you know for sure that you are hitting the mark in client service? Implement a formal and informal client feedback program, and train your lawyers to ask clients the right questions at every step of a matter.

Perhaps even worse than not asking for feedback is not taking action when you receive it. You must act on it. Your goal is to become a client-centric law firm that not only collects client feedback but takes uses it to take prompt and effective action that can enhance the customer journey. So, ask away!

2. Become a true business partner – When buyers of legal services discuss what they value most in a provider, the desire for trust, predictability, truly understanding their client’s business, being proactive and cost sensitive come up time and time again. The golden rule of customer service is always to treat your clients as you would want to be treated. I would add that it is very important to make each of your clients feel as if they are your only client. None of these concepts are rocket science, but rather client-service basics that often fall by the wayside when we are busy. Your number one job at all times is to consistently over-deliver in these areas.

3. Know your client’s business inside and out – Stay attuned to major developments and news affecting your clients. It will enable you to better anticipate their needs and be a smarter legal solution provider. Take the time to do in-depth marketing due diligence/CI on a few VIP clients as well as prospects. Learn their businesses inside and out. What challenges and opportunities are they facing? How can you help them with these? Sometimes all you need to do is ask them.

Also, set up Google Alerts on your clients and prospects – this will provide valuable information and give you reasons to reach out to them to congratulate them on a success or milestone, or send an article that touches on a legal issue they might be facing. Use this intelligence to reach out to those individuals in your network who you’ve been meaning to contact. Such timely touchpoints enable you to stay top of mind with important connections. Don’t let your clients/prospects forget you.

4. Cultivate your network every day – More than 90% of those making hiring decisions draw on information from people they know. Think about what that says about the importance of your firm’s and lawyers’ professional networks in the referral process. Also, in-house counsel regularly hire outside counsel whom they know and trust – from law school, a prior firm, a friend of a friend, or a past matter. Why not let it be your lawyers who receive these referrals? Nurturing relationships is vital to business development success. Encourage your lawyers to keep in touch with former colleagues, past clients, alumni from law school and undergraduate schools.

Enhance these relationships with a combination of in-person and online networking (LinkedIn being the place where professionals convene and interact). Also, don’t underestimate the importance of every connection. Each person you meet is potentially someone who is in or will be in a position to help you down the line as a prospective employer, employee, referral, reference, source of business or even your opponents.

I have seen several instances where lawyers have gotten new clients based on the way they handled themselves during a heated negotiation. In essence, the client said, I want that person on my side the next time I have an issue. So, be fair, helpful and kind to everyone. Because you never know.

5. Give before you get – The days of taking a client out for lunch, a drink or a sports event are dwindling. While in-person interactions remain vital, clients are no different than your lawyers and are getting pulled in many directions both professionally and personally. As a result, many prefer to interact with their outside counsel through touchpoints that enable law firms and lawyers to demonstrate how they provide value to them – which offers an opportunity to showcase their legal prowess.

This type of reputational marketing often has a much stronger impact than any concert or fancy dinner, so perhaps offer a CLE program or send a relevant article with a note about why they should care about this development. Or, even better, co-author an article with them, invite them to speak on a panel, or offer them a free pass to a conference your firm is sponsoring. Invest in your clients in a way that provides something of value to them.

6. Show vs. tell – What communications resonate most with clients? Tailored, value-added and easily digestible client alerts and newsletters with engaging and to-the-point subject lines (from the law firms they actually use). Ensure that these communications are client-focused – and there’s more show than tell in the approach. Demonstrate that you are the very best lawyer or law firm by showcasing your legal expertise and unique value proposition. These “light touches” keep your firm top of mind with your professional contacts and can often lead to new business, or at the very least, help you elevate your lawyers to be seen as subject-matter experts.

7. Communicate strategically and thoughtfully – Another important note on content – the information you send to clients and prospects should be sent strategically and sparingly. Segment your mailing lists and analyze engagement and open rates. Many firms are taking a “random acts of content” approach to their strategy, a waste of time for everyone, most importantly, the prospect or client. Use the power offered by your email marketing software and social media analytics. Play the role of the client and think about what you would like to receive and how often if you were them. If you always put yourself in your clients’ shoes, you will always be on the right path.

8. Don’t play the guessing game – Make sure your clients know exactly who is on their legal team at every stage of their matter. Provide multiple points of contact for clients and make it easy for them to get to know everyone on their team – from paralegals, to associates, to partners.

Here’s a novel client-centric idea – create a handy reference guide for your VIP clients, with photos, contact information and short bios of each person working on their matters. Include LinkedIn URLs of each person and their undergraduate and law school information – again, this approach will help to find commonalities and connection touchpoints. If appropriate, include a fun fact about each person as an ice breaker. Email this information to clients as a branded PDF or even laminate it and send hard copies for easy reference. You’d be surprised how far something like this will go in showing the client just how much you value your relationship with them and how you strive to make their lives easier.

It’s never been more important to adopt a client-centric approach to everything you do as a law firm in this competitive and saturated market. The idea is to invest in your clients in a way that allows your firm and lawyers to showcase their knowledge and experience.

Remember, by making your client look good at their companies, you make your firm look good and you will elevate your position and value within the organization. This approach is a win-win for all involved.

So going forward, follow through, put the client first and do what they ask you to do. That is key to delighting the client and building longlasting attorney-client relationships.

Copyright © 2023, Stefanie M. Marrone. All Rights Reserved.National Law Review, Volume XIII, Number 157

In defence of the cosmetic whales | Opinion

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

On the whole, Diablo 4 has had an incredibly positive response. People like the visuals, the storytelling, and the gameplay, and there’s a strong sense that the series is back on track after the ill-judged (at least from the perspective of long-time fans) Diablo Immortal mobile title.

The reviews are positive, the community is mostly happy – there’s just one fly in the ointment, it seems. That’s the existence of a single tab in the game’s menus, 'Shop', wherein you’ll find a set of cosmetic items (armour, mounts, and the likes) that the game is happy to sell you for between $10 and $20 a pop. There’s some lovely, well-designed stuff in there, but without forking over the cash, you can look but you can’t touch – dressing your character up in those fancy duds demands a surcharge over the full-price game you just bought.

Nobody seems terribly happy about this. There are plenty of articles and forum threads about it; some enterprising person on Reddit figured out that buying all the cosmetics Diablo 4 offers on day one would set you back well over $300, more than five times the price of the base game itself.

The whole situation is spiced up a little by the fact that reviewers weren’t given access to the in-game store prior to launch, so they couldn’t include any exam of the store and its pricing in their conclusions. The reasoning for that isn’t entirely unfair, in that all the items in the store are purely cosmetic and don’t impact gameplay, so you could argue that they ought not to change how the game is reviewed.

This decision speaks to the developers wanting very much to focus attention away from the whole question of in-game item purchases and pricing

Still, that situation has contributed to a sense that the store’s pricing is something sneaky that has been slipped into the game without anyone getting a chance to scrutinise it before making a buying decision.

I don’t think this is a case of being sneaky – we’ve known that the cosmetics store would be a part of the game for ages – but I do think this decision speaks to the developers wanting very much to focus attention away from the whole question of in-game item purchases and pricing.

It’s not like technical problems with putting the store online pre-launch should have stopped them from giving reviewers this information if they wanted to – simply knocking out a PDF with screenshots, descriptions, and item prices would have been a fair solution. But developers in general feel a bit caught between a rock and a hard place with regard to this kind of commercial aspect in their games.

A cosmetic-only in-game store arguably meets most of the demands and addresses most of the concerns people initially had about the adoption of F2P-style business models, but these stores are still loudly despised – inspiring people to throw around words like "greedy" and "rip-off" – while also seemingly being commercially successful enough to overcome fears of any such backlash.

Trapped between those realities, you can forgive developers for just wanting to keep quiet about this whole aspect – especially a developer like Blizzard, which was dragged over the coals for its in-game transaction systems in Diablo 3, and more recently faced a backlash to similarly pricey player skins in Overwatch 2.

That’s the thing: it’s not like anyone making the decision to include this store, with these prices, was doing so unaware of how a vocal group of consumers and commentators would respond. Blizzard, of all companies, knew it was going to get bashed for selling items in-game, especially expensive items.

Just for once, I’d like to see a developer really step forward to make a full-throated defence of this business model

Hell, reaching back into the depths of video game controversies past, one of the categories of items Diablo 4 will happily sell you is actual honest-to-god horse armour: it’s not like they’re even trying especially hard to avoid being dunked on for their choices here. They were probably resigned to this response, but they clearly didn’t feel the need to draw focus to this aspect either.

This is actually a shame, because just for once, I’d like to see a developer really step forward to make a full-throated defence of this business model. This approach is becoming the dominant paradigm for a lot of different games, with many developers of successful games settling on an in-game cosmetic store with $10 to $20 price points for virtual items as a key part of their business model.

Fortnite does it (it has one of the most extensive item stores, in which buying all the skins would set you back tens of thousands of dollars), Call of Duty does it, Destiny does it, and of course Overwatch and now Diablo do it, to name but a few. Charging people a fair chunk of change for a cosmetic item has become incredibly common, but the negative reaction to almost any kind of in-game transaction model has meant that we reached this point with little proper discussion, debate, or defence of the decisions which led us here.

Yet this model deserves a defence, because in almost every way it’s the least problematic option available – and while it’s never going to make people feel happy when they see a character skin that costs more than $20 (a third the price of the game itself!), it should at least mollify them to know that every other path video game monetisation might have gone down was far, far worse.

Selling cosmetic items only, albeit at a premium, is a far less obnoxious approach than almost any alternative, from locking up playable content behind paywalls, via play-to-win item sales, through to the grifters’ favourite du jour, play-to-earn cryptocurrency-based models.

Most developers have embraced the idea that players should be able to fully enjoy the entire experience of the game without ever paying for any kind of in-game purchase (not all, though, with Blizzard itself arguably tripping up by locking new hero characters behind its premium Battle Pass in Overwatch 2, for example), but the flipside is that players who do decide to buy optional cosmetics end up paying a lot for the privilege.

Selling cosmetic items only, albeit at a premium, is a far less obnoxious approach than almost any alternative

Much of the anger that this generates from players focuses on the seeming imbalance between the price for a cosmetic skin and the price for entire games. The fact that a cosmetic item for a game is priced at a level that will easily buy you a high-quality indie game (or an older AAA title) in its entirety, or net you a couple of months of Game Pass, does make the cost of these items look faintly ridiculous.

But market economics sets prices according to what people are willing to pay, not what makes logical sense based on production costs. All of these games have not set their prices at similar levels just because their business model designers are copying each other’s homework; nor did some scheming executive just pick out a ludicrously high price point while cackling maniacally in a boardroom somewhere.

This pricing convergence happened because after a long process of testing, this turned out to be the price point that maximises revenue from cosmetic items; this is the price that sits on the sweet spot where the demand and price curves intersect.

That shouldn’t be surprising – it makes sense that higher-priced cosmetics would spur demand rather than suppressing it. Many people who dislike the pricing argue that if the items were cheaper, more people would buy them, and the game would make more money – but that’s clearly not the case. In fact, the value of cosmetic items lies partially in their rarity, and in the fact that not everyone has them, or has been willing to pay for them.

Owning a cosmetic most people don’t have is a flex; it makes your character a little bit unique, and for many players, there’s real value in that. If the price dropped and more people could buy the cosmetic, it would open it up to new audiences – but would also decrease the appeal of the item itself, which no longer felt rare or premium. Skins and other cosmetics are luxury items, not commodities; you could quite easily find yourself dropping item prices only to find that it actually decreases demand, rather than increasing it.

This brings me back around to why I want a developer to actually take the bit between their teeth and make the case for this model properly. The business model itself is grounded in commercial data and testing over the long term – it’s not some wild idea cooked up lately by "greedy" developers daydreaming about filling Scrooge McDuck’s swimming pool with the revenues from selling FPS game skins.

Rather, it’s the best way we’ve come up with so far to generate solid additive revenues from games without ruining the experience for those who can’t or won’t pay for the extra items. That’s not optional bonus revenue – it’s a crucial part of the business model, because absent the ability to generate additional revenue after launch, the economics of developing and selling games have never been tougher.

We don’t have to love the existence of cosmetic whales, but we can appreciate that the model works, does little harm, and has kept the industry away from far less consumer-friendly solutions

It may not feel like it in the current economic climate, but games have never been cheaper (adjusted for inflation, games are still much cheaper right now than at any point in the 1990s or 2000s) while the cost of development, and of meeting players’ skyrocketing expectations, has never been higher.

That’s why the discussion of business models needs to happen, and the fantasy that games would be just fine and dandy if they were sold at $60 and never made a cent afterwards needs to be deflated. If games were priced now as they were in the PS1 and PS2 eras, they would cost around $100, inflation-adjusted; SNES-era titles topped $120 to $140 in today’s money. That’s not even allowing for the massive increase in the cost of creating them, or the huge amount of high-fidelity content and assets, fully voice acted with an orchestral score and cinematic cutscenes, that consumers now expect from top-tier titles.

Nobody wants $100 games, let alone $120 or more – not consumers and not the industry. Given which, is it not a wonderful thing that those costs can instead be offset by selling some totally optional shiny virtual clothing to the minority of people who love the game enough to be willing to pay a premium for that? The other possibilities suggested by the rise of F2P models were a far darker timeline; we don’t have to love the existence of cosmetic whales, but we can at least appreciate that the model works, does little harm, and has kept the industry away from far less consumer-friendly solutions to its very real economic dilemma.

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

How Caste Discrimination Continues to Affect South Asian Californians

Like many recent arrivals to California, Prem Pariyar searched for work and a home within communities of fellow immigrants.

So when coworkers at a South Asian restaurant in Davis refused to room with him in an apartment his employer provided, he was shocked by their reason: his caste. Not his race, religion, or nationality, but the centuries-old social hierarchies still prevalent in some South Asian societies.

Pariyar is Dalit, which means “broken” in Sanskrit and is considered the lowest-ranking caste, formerly known as “untouchables.” In Nepal, he said, his family faced violence and harassment. He thought he had escaped that here.

“I was speechless,” he said of his coworkers’ actions, which left him depressed, traumatized and living in a van for a month in 2015 until he quit the restaurant. “Why did these people practice these kinds of things here in the U.S.?”

Today Pariyar, who won asylum and became a U.S. citizen, is one of California’s most vocal activists for a ban on caste discrimination. After successfully pushing for California State University to adopt a ban in 2022, Pariyar, a social worker in the East Bay, is focused on getting protections for so-called lower-caste people into the state’s fair housing and employment laws.

Legislation to do that is contentious. In April, it drew one of the largest public hearing turnouts for any bill before California’s Legislature this session. It would be the first statewide measure of its kind in the nation, although Seattle passed a similar ordinance in February.

While many Californians may never know anyone who experiences caste discrimination, or even what it is, for some, it’s both hidden and inescapable.

For many worshipers at Shri Guru Ravidass Temple on the outskirts of Sacramento, the issue is about their families’ futures: Will the discrimination they experienced as Dalits in India follow them to California? Will it stop their children from achieving the American Dream?

Followers of the Ravidass religion, which is related to Sikhism, belong to the Dalit caste but formed their distinct faith as a move against caste discrimination. On a recent Sunday, between services and a meal, members swapped anecdotes about the discrimination they encountered, including in the U.S.

In social settings among other South Asians, they said, they’ve heard derogatory comments about Dalits. One man, a hospital janitor, believes he got tougher assignments because his supervisors and colleagues from upper castes played favorites.

Some said bosses, coworkers and classmates asked probing questions — about their last names, the temple they attended, their relatives’ jobs back home — that to an outsider may seem innocuous, but are common ways to discern someone’s caste background in India.

Several who spoke to CalMatters work as truck drivers. In many ways, they said, the legacy of the caste system had already shaped the trajectory of their lives, because it limits the jobs and education available to them both in India and now the U.S.

“It was really hard for our people to get up, to get a high-paying job and higher education,” said Raj Rohl, 40. “We struggled a lot. We don’t want that to happen here, so our kids struggle again here to get the education they want, to get the jobs they want.”

“Honestly, we don’t really deal with that many Brahmins here,” said Raj Vadhan, 50, referring to the highest caste classification. The bill, he said, would help more with “discrimination going on at the upper-level jobs, the higher-paying jobs.”

South Asians on the other side of the debate say the bill is unnecessary — and unfair.

“To tackle discrimination, we have very strong existing laws and existing protections under categories of ancestry and national origin. They can, and should, be used to deal with any issues of caste-based discrimination as they arise — and they have actually already been used,” said Samir Kalra, managing director of the Hindu American Foundation, an advocacy group opposing the bill.

“Creating an entire separate category and law that only applies to minority communities is inconsistent with our constitutional norms.”

Sen. Aisha Wahab, a first-term Democrat from Fremont, wants to add caste as a protected category to the state Unruh Civil Rights Act, the California Fair Employment and Housing Act and the state policy that bans discrimination in public schools.

“As our state and country become more and more diverse, our laws have to go further and deeper and clarify more specifically, what is being protected,” she told CalMatters. “And caste discrimination is something that should not take place here in the United States, let alone in California.”

The Senate approved her bill, SB 403, on a 34–1 vote on May 11, but advocacy groups opposed to the measure will try again to kill or change it in the Assembly. Senate Republican leader Brian Jones of El Cajon was the lone “no” vote, calling the bill “duplicative and unnecessarily divisive.”

The concept of the South Asian caste system has been in the U.S. since at least 1965 when a federal immigration law overhaul resulted in immigrants from more Asian countries receiving visas. But because those visas focused on skilled labor, the legacy of caste discrimination in India meant upper-caste Indian immigrants were able to establish themselves in the U.S. decades before lower-caste Hindus.

The issue became more prominent recently, partly because the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement in Indian politics reinforced caste divisions as it sought to unify and strengthen the Hindu identity in India.

One of the earliest examples of caste making headlines in California: In 1999, federal prosecutors charged Berkeley real estate magnate Lakireddy Bali Reddy, as well as his brother, sister-in-law and sons, for smuggling Indian women into the U.S. for illegal sexual activity. Prosecutors said Reddy “took advantage of casteism and economic class to exploit these women.” He was convicted of sex trafficking and spent eight years in federal prison before dying in Oakland in 2021.

Caste issues have surfaced prominently in Silicon Valley, where Indian workers with bachelor’s degrees made up 27% of tech workers in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties in 2021. In April 2021, the Santa Clara County Human Rights Commission held informational hearings about caste discrimination.

In 2020, what is now the state Civil Rights Department sued Cisco, the San José-based networking and cloud management company, and two engineers after an employee filed a complaint alleging he received less pay and fewer opportunities because he was Dalit. He also said the defendants retaliated against him when he spoke out.

The two engineers denied the allegations, saying in court filings they reject caste hierarchies and recruited the employee to Cisco with competitive pay and stock options. The state dropped its case against the engineers, but continues the suit against the company. The state and Cisco are in mediation talks. Attorneys for the company and the two engineers did not respond to requests for comment.

While caste discrimination is difficult for corporations to navigate, it’s also a thorny issue for politicians.

Rohit Chopra, a professor of global media and cultural identity at Santa Clara University, said some politicians don’t want to be seen as targeting any community — including the Indian community, which has political clout. That gives the opposition a window of opportunity, particularly those in the “Hindu right,” he said.

“Whatever organizations are sort of spearheading this … they keep appropriating this right to speak for all Hindus and all Indians,” he said.

Wahab, the first Afghan-American lawmaker in the Legislature, is not South Asian, but represents a district that is home to many. In response to the bill, she said she has been the target of threats and derogatory comments about her identity, as well as a recall campaign led by congressional candidate Ritesh Tandon, a San José-area former Cisco engineer. He says his platform includes protecting Silicon Valley jobs, addressing climate change and ending racial preferences in hiring.

There are two South Asians in the Legislature: Democratic Assemblymembers Ash Kalra from San José and Jasmeet Bains from Bakersfield.

Bains, who represents a large Sikh population, signed on as a co-sponsor to the bill in mid-April, but did not respond to requests for an interview on her reasons. Kalra, who is not a co-sponsor and represents part of Silicon Valley, declined an interview. Neither has had to vote on the bill yet.

Naindeep Singh, executive director of Jakara Movement, a community organizing group for Sikh Californians, said the group supports the bill because “while Sikh theology calls for caste abolitionism, still among some Sikh societies casteism is still practiced.”

While some opponents say the bill will make them targets for discrimination, Singh argues that much of the opposition is in bad faith. “The argument that the bill singles out South Asian communities is a canard,” he said. “It is rather simple: If you don’t discriminate against others based on caste, you have little to fear with SB 403’s passage.”

Kalra, of the Hindu American Foundation, pushed back on that argument.

“You’re already going to be assumed to be caste-ist just as a South Asian, so you are already facing suspicion. And if you are falsely accused, it’s a nightmare to go through that process,” he said.

The foundation has submitted amendments to the bill that would remove language such as “caste-oppressed,” which it says would result in racial profiling of South Asians, he said.

Amar Shergill, the former chairperson of the California Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus whose family is from India, said politicians have hesitated to discuss caste, but “thankfully, we are at that place now.”

“Let’s face it, this is a difficult issue to discuss,” he said. “Like so many issues of oppression within the community — whether it’s sex discrimination or child abuse or caste oppression — folks don’t want to talk about the pain in their own community.”

The caste bill is the latest flashpoint as immigrants bring conflicts from their home country to California.

The state is home to 10.5 million immigrants — 23% of the foreign-born population nationwide, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. Nearly a third of California’s population is foreign-born, and almost half of California children have at least one immigrant parent. The fall of the Soviet Union, wars and other global conflicts touched off new waves of migration to California.

Included in those waves are Asian Americans, who make up about 15% of the state’s population, according to the 2020 Census. In 2021, nearly 1 million in California self-identified as South Asian — from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Sri Lanka, according to an analysis by the University of Minnesota.

Data on subgroups of immigrants, such as by caste, can be more difficult to track.

A 2016 national survey by the Oakland-based activist group Equality Labs found that two-thirds of Dalit respondents said they had been mistreated at work, one-third said they experienced discrimination during their education and one-half said they feared being “outed.” In a 2022 research paper Pariyar co-authored while studying at Cal State East Bay, 24 of 27 Dalit Nepalis interviewed in the Bay Area said they had experienced some form of caste-based discrimination, including two who said they were forced out by roommates or landlords when their caste was discovered.

Opponents of the bill say caste discrimination reports are overstated in the Equality Labs survey. They point instead to a broader 2021 survey of Indian Americans in the U.S. by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in which only 5% of respondents reported experiencing caste discrimination — though the study notes that the majority of respondents who were Hindu and identified with a caste reported being from an upper caste.

Scholars such as Audrey Truschke, a historian of South Asia and associate professor at Rutgers University, say California has set a precedent for addressing issues that affect even “micro-minorities.”

That may be due to California’s diverse population, which has long forced its lawmakers to confront broader issues.

Take, for instance, an international dispute between Armenian and Turkish people. Among California’s oldest and largest immigrant populations, Armenians first settled in Fresno as early as the 1870s and in larger numbers after World War I, following their deportation from what is now Turkey. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians died from starvation or disease during the forced expulsion in 1915 and 1916 to Syria and elsewhere, in what most scholars call a genocide.

California officially recognized the genocide in 1968. But the Republic of Turkey balked, acknowledging the deaths but denying what occurred was systemic. And due to its alliance with Turkey, the United States did not recognize the conflict as a genocide until April 2021.

Former Assemblymember Adrin Nazarian, who pushed for a 2022 law establishing Genocide Remembrance Day in California, said he wrote the bill in a way that would not just solely acknowledge the trauma of the Armenian community. 

“It’s only respectful if we have a day of commemoration that every community can identify with,” he said. “No one’s trauma is at the end of the day greater than the others, or at least we should never treat it that way.”

A more recent example was in 2017, when then-Assemblymember Rob Bonta authored a bill to repeal a Cold War-era ban on communists working for the state, though it was rarely enforced. Bonta, now attorney general, said he pulled his bill out of respect for Vietnamese immigrants who had fled the communist regime in Vietnam.

Vincent Tran, organizing director for VietRise, an advocacy group for the Vietnamese community in Orange County, said many immigrants’ political activism is rooted in both the conflicts they fled and quality-of-life issues such as affordable housing.

“It’s part of the bigger plan to institutionalize the identity,” Tran said. “What does it mean to be Vietnamese American?”

In the case of caste, Dalit activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan of Equality Labs said the anti-discrimination bill is more than a statement on international politics.

“It’s not about, ‘We need to make a moral stand,’” she said, “It’s actually that California institutions, California workers and California renters are being impacted.”

At the heart of the state’s debate now: Does California already prohibit caste discrimination? (PDF)

The Cisco case shows that the state can already act on allegations of caste discrimination, though the company in court filings has contended that caste is not a protected identity. California’s civil rights department said current law allows renters and employees to make caste-based discrimination claims under the state’s bans of discrimination based on race or ancestry.

The department could not say — out of the more than 10,000 annual complaints of racial or ancestry-based discrimination — how many mention caste. Nor would it comment on how adding caste to the law would specifically affect how it handles those complaints.