Lawrence Organ

Owen Diaz's case against Tesla began with an elevator operator. Diaz, a Black worker at Tesla's Fremont factory, said that supervisors and coworkers used racist epithets around him, that racist drawings and graffiti appeared in the workplace, and that the abuse continued after he complained. The trial Organ led as counsel for Diaz turned on far more than one encounter: it asked the jury to consider the working environment Diaz entered each day, the people who heard the same language, the complaints made to supervisors, and the response that followed. The proof included testimony from employees who had heard racial slurs at the factory and evidence of Diaz's early complaints; one supervisor who had questioned whether a complaint was corroborated acknowledged at trial that the incident had occurred. Piece by piece, the evidence formed a documented account of repetition and notice, letting jurors evaluate what Tesla's managers knew and what they did with that knowledge.

In 2021, the federal jury returned a $136.9 million verdict for Diaz. The court later reduced the award to $15 million; Diaz chose a new damages trial, a second jury returned $3.2 million, and a confidential 2024 settlement ended the parties' appeals. Through every stage of that arc, the substance remained racial harassment at the Fremont plant and an employer's response to a worker's complaints, examined in open court. The 2021 trial was tried with Organ, partner Navruz Avloni, associate Cimone Nunley, paralegal Sabrina Grislis, and trial specialist Susan Organ — a firm working at full strength to put a factory before a jury.

The Accumulation Principle

Harassment cases depend on accumulation. A remark may be disputed. A complaint may be recast as informal. A manager may claim no one supplied enough information to require action. A trial record changes the scale by setting incidents beside one another and comparing the employer's stated rules with the conduct witnesses describe. Organ has asked juries to make that comparison in workplaces as different as an automobile factory, a grocery company, a global law firm, a cinema chain, and a hospital system — and the juries have answered.

In Gober v. Ralphs Grocery Co., he served as trial counsel in a sexual-harassment case that produced a $30.55 million jury verdict, putting the conduct and the employer's response before a jury in the setting of a major grocery business. In Weeks v. Baker & McKenzie, he was counsel in a sexual-harassment case against a global law firm, where the jury returned a verdict of $7.1 million. The defendant was itself a legal institution, fluent in litigation and professional systems, yet the plaintiff's case still had to be organized as a workplace case — conduct, reporting channels, retaliation, harm — for jurors outside that institution. Organ later led trial work in Marsicz v. UltraStar Cinemas, where the jury returned a $6.85 million sexual-harassment verdict. Across the three, the industries and job titles change while the essential questions hold steady: what employees experienced, how people with supervisory power behaved, and whether the employer met its responsibility once it knew.

His docket extends to those who speak up about more than their own treatment. Organ represented Kristeen Klaas, a longtime operating-room nurse who reported patient-safety and regulatory concerns at ValleyCare Health Systems and alleged that the hospital retaliated by refusing to rehire her. An Alameda County jury found for Klaas, awarding $44,198 in economic damages and $300,000 in punitive damages — a verdict that placed the safety reports, the nurse's employment history, and the rehire decision in a single evidentiary frame.

An Ordinary Person, Strong Representation

Organ's stated commitment is to give an ordinary person strong representation when the opposing party is a large corporation or other employer. The practice he built at California Civil Rights Law Group follows that premise into the courtroom. It does not depend on a worker arriving with institutional power; it depends on making the institution answer the evidence under the same rules that govern the employee's testimony. Policies can be read aloud. Managers can be questioned. Coworkers can describe what they saw and heard. California Civil Rights Law Group works exclusively on plaintiff-side employment civil-rights cases — discrimination, harassment, retaliation, whistleblower claims — from offices in San Francisco, Oakland, San Anselmo, and Beverly Hills. Organ's current work centers on jury trials and arbitrations and on helping other lawyers prepare and try their own cases, extending the craft beyond his own docket.

The Long Preparation

The discipline behind the courtroom performance has deep roots. Organ earned his bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, then a master's degree in politics with honors from Monash University in Melbourne before graduating cum laude from Duke University School of Law in 1994. At Duke he chaired the Moot Court Board and served as an editor of the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum. Admitted to the California bar in 1994, he now practices before the federal district courts for the Northern, Eastern, and Central Districts of California, the Ninth Circuit, and, since 2018, the United States Supreme Court. He has appeared on CNN, Good Morning America, CBS News, and MSNBC, and has been quoted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg on workplace civil-rights issues.

Outside his cases, Organ has served on the Town of San Anselmo's Racial Equity Ad Hoc Committee. In court, he assembles the workplace from contemporaneous records and human testimony — the shift, the supervisor, the complaint, the witnesses. Jurors can then determine what the employer knew, how it responded and whether it is liable for the resulting harm.