Harmeet K. Dhillon 

As a prominent conservative lawyer, Harmeet K. Dhillon is glad to say that business is good. The firm she launched in 2006, Dhillon Law Group Inc., has grown post-COVID to two dozen lawyers and five offices in four states.

“I view myself as a civil rights lawyer,” she said. “There’s an amazingly rich tradition in the U.S. of using the courts to change the laws and the culture — look at school desegregation, for instance. But I haven’t seen a lot of people on the right using the law this way.”

Clients include Tucker Carlson, Turning Point USA, Project Veritas, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Young America’s Foundation, pro-life activist David Daleidin and his Center for Medical Progress, the Life Action Network, the National Association for Gun Rights and a wide range of conservative journalists, student groups, the Republican National Committee and several state parties and political candidates.

She has performed pro bono legal work for public interest causes such as domestic violence and sex trafficking victim protection and has led the legal teams in lawsuits securing the rights of religious workers in government and private employment and the rights of college student groups to host speakers of their choice at UC Berkeley.

Most of the lawyers at her firm joined to work for conservative clients and causes that they weren’t allowed to represent at Big Law firms, Dhillon said. She once was one of them. “At one prior firm, I was allowed to do asylum and domestic violence cases, but pro-life and transgender cases were off limits,” she said.

Dhillon, in late May, was preparing a cert petition to the U.S. Supreme Court in a case she lost at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It claims that Twitter, Inc. wrongly became a state actor by collaborating with the California secretary of state to silence an attorney who tweeted election fraud claims following the 2020 election. O’Handley v. Weber et al., 22-15071 (9th Cir., op filed March 10, 2023).

“Since we filed, Elon Musk opened the books, and the Twitter files vindicate our position,” Dhillon said.

She’s also working to, as she puts it, “protect vulnerable children from surgical gender mutilation for profit.” Dhillon represents a Stockton woman who was 15 when a hospital allegedly performed a radical double mastectomy on her as part of sex change procedures. Cole v. Kaiser Foundation Hospitals et al., STK-CV-UMM-2023-0001612 (San Joaquin Co. Super. Ct., filed Feb. 22, 2023).

“I like making a difference,” Dhillon said.

— John Roemer