For years, radical activists have pressed DEI mandates in classrooms and boardrooms. Now they are taking the same campaign to courtrooms, using litigation to weaponize the court system and create a backdoor mechanism for imposing radical diversity policies outside the legislative process.

Alliance for Consumers’ new report, Lawfare in America: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, details how activists and their trial lawyer allies use employment litigation to secure settlements that compel companies to adopt DEI practices, including mandatory diversity training, hiring benchmarks, pay-equity audits, and years of outside oversight to ensure diversity quotas are being met.

These lawsuits, which often end with settlements, receive far less public attention than woke legislative proposals. There are no committee hearings, no floor debates, and no scrutiny for politicians supporting the DEI agenda. Instead, under the looming threat of legal liability, companies capitulate to activist plaintiffs’ demands to embed DEI initiatives by reshaping hiring, management, and internal policies for years to come.

A settlement involving Goldman Sachs illustrates how this strategy operates. The $215 million agreement required pay-equity studies and empowered an independent expert to examine the company’s performance-review process. It did more than compensate employees who brought claims; it placed core employment practices under outside supervision.

The pattern extends well beyond one company. In an infamous lawsuit against Google, Lieff Cabraser, a law firm known for its strong Democrat connections and left-wing agenda, secured a settlement that brought audits and outside oversight of hiring and promotion practices. In a similar case, Disney agreed to pay millions while undertaking an audit and conducting mandatory training led by organizational psychologists. Abercrombie & Fitch agreed to hire diversity recruiters, create a new diversity vice president position, require diversity training, and establish hiring benchmarks. Each of these cases was supported by activist groups that push DEI policies.

What’s concerning about these settlements is that they frequently mandate corporate DEI initiatives that exceed the scope of most legislative proposals.

Trial lawyers have every incentive to keep this machine running. Large settlements mean large fees. Activist organizations can file briefs, organize pressure campaigns, and push courts toward the same political goals case after case. And in turn, the trial lawyers profiting from this litigation feed funding back into the activist infrastructure through political donations. Our report reveals that the trial lawyers behind these cases consistently directed almost all of their FEC-recorded political donations to Democrats and allied groups, illustrating the closely linked incentives between the activists pushing DEI policies and the trial lawyers weaponizing courtrooms to extract DEI commitments from the companies they sue.

Shining a light on the Left’s antics here is important, before this becomes a runaway train.

Americans need to know that litigation is producing policy changes far beyond resolving the underlying claims and that lawfare is reshaping the world around us, often without being noticed.

As a recent account of this strategy explained, companies face enormous pressure to settle rather than risk years of costly litigation, even when the proposed terms reach deep into their operations. Consumers ultimately shoulder the burden, with fewer product choices, higher costs, and a deeper seepage of woke priorities into the economy and corporate America.

When large corporations agree to spend money on consultants, compliance officers, monitoring systems, legal reviews, and training programs as a part of settlement agreements, they inevitably must divert time and attention from serving customers, developing products, and competing for business. And that is before the new DEI bureaucracy gets around to convincing companies to take away the products people want to buy and replace them with the kinds of options preferred only in DEI utopia and leftist enclaves.

Courts should resolve actual disputes, not serve as a backdoor legislature. Consumers deserve better than a legal system that lets activists and trial lawyers bypass the democratic process, impose their agenda through litigation, and leave everyone else to pay the price. It is time for this lawfare to end.

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O.H. Skinner is the executive director of Alliance for Consumers.

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The Hidden Way Corporate Lawfare Is Keeping DEI Alive