My guest today is Amandeep Sidhu, a partner at Winston & Strawn and a co-founder of the Sikh Coalition, the civil rights organization that came together in the days after 9/11. We talk about how a small group of young Sikh Americans built the Coalition out of their apartments, car trunks, and after-hours conference rooms, and how Amandeep spent more than a decade leading the pro bono work that opened the U.S. military to turban-wearing, bearded Sikh service members. It's a conversation about responding to a hard moment by building something durable, and about assembling a portfolio of causes over a career.

Top Insights

  • The Sikh Coalition was founded in the days after 9/11, when the Sikh community had no dedicated civil rights organization the way the NAACP or ADL served other communities.
  • The founders deliberately kept the group flat rather than built around a single personality, and refused to fundraise until they had proven they could actually help the community.
  • Bringing the Sikh Coalition in as a pro bono client at McDermott Will & Emery turned one lawyer's volunteer hours into an institutional commitment; by the time Amandeep left the firm, it had contributed roughly $3.5 to nearly $4 million in pro bono services.
  • The Coalition's military campaign, now in its twelfth year, helped open the U.S. Army to observant Sikhs, and more than 60 turban-wearing, bearded Sikhs now serve, with the Air Force following in 2019.
  • A single Army policy change in January 2017 converted years of hard-won individual accommodations into a standing path for observant Sikhs, and the grooming and uniform diagrams the Coalition had drafted, adapted from Canadian, UK, and Indian military policy, ended up written into the rule itself.
  • In 2013 Amandeep became the first turban-wearing Sikh partner at an Am Law 100 firm, and he frames outside passions like pro bono as the balance to the intense billable work that keeps a legal career sustainable.

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Full Transcript

Khurram Naik: This is Khurram Naik with Khurram's Quorum. My guest today is Amandeep Sidhu, who was a partner at Winston & Strawn and the co-founder of the Sikh Coalition, which was formed in response to the events of 9/11 and the impact it had on the Sikh community and other communities as well. And I'm really interested in Amandeep's story because it was born as a reaction to some challenging circumstances, and it's fascinating how he and the organization responded to that in a thoughtful way, and the very collaborative approach they've taken in building consensus, and just being very thoughtful about the portfolio of activities they've undertaken and how this affected him professionally. So I think this is an incredible story for anyone who's looking to make change and build consensus along the way. So I hope you'll enjoy this as much as I did. Hey Amandeep, great to see you again.

Amandeep Sidhu: Great to talk to you again. Great to see you as well.

Khurram Naik: So, you know, in our last conversation, your story was really powerful, and I normally try not to just repeat narratives or rehash stories that people have told before, but yours is too good to not just let you take the floor, because I'm really fascinated with the origin of the Sikh Coalition, and I was wondering if you can just tell me the story about how that organization came to be.

Amandeep Sidhu: Really my pleasure, and thank you for the opportunity. So we're coming up on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and the attacks on our country that really transformed our lives in so many ways. At that time I was a couple of months out of college. I had just graduated in 2000, so I was about a year out, and was working as a consultant in Washington, D.C. I had grown up, born and raised in Virginia, grew up outside of Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy. My parents were one of the first Sikh families to settle in central Virginia.

And just by circumstance, being a very visible minority as a turban-wearing Sikh, and my father being the same, I grew up going to community centers and churches and other venues around central Virginia helping to educate those communities about the Sikh faith, really out of self-preservation and a desire to integrate into our community. That was sort of how I grew up, and that continued a bit through high school and college, but on a very localized level. When 9/11 happened, I was working in Old Town, Alexandria. I lived in Arlington on the other side of town, drove past the Pentagon that morning on the way to work, and was listening to the radio and hearing about the attacks in New York and the first plane hitting one of the twin towers. By the time I got to my office and came upstairs, the second plane had hit the second tower, and before we even saw on the news what had happened at the Pentagon, we actually could see the smoke rising from the Pentagon in the distance. In those moments it was just this overwhelming feeling, and even now as I tell the story a chill goes up my spine, because it was such an attack on our country, an attack on us as Americans, that thousands of people's lives had been lost, tens of thousands of lives were transformed, and that nothing was going to be the same after that.

So we sat and we watched on TV as the two towers burned, and we watched what happened at the Pentagon, and then in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. As it unfolded, cell phone service was down, regular telephone service was down, and the only thing that actually allowed us to communicate was email. So I hopped onto my computer and I emailed my family to let them know that I was safe in D.C. They knew that I worked with a DOD contractor and that I had been in the Pentagon for meetings in the past, so I let them know I was okay. I contacted my friends in New York, and most of my close friends were all safe and far away from the financial district. But then I started to get emails on Yahoo group listservs and other ways we were communicating back then, before social media and Twitter and Facebook, and we were hearing about the backlash starting to unfold. An elderly gentleman in New York attacked with a spiked baseball bat as he walked back from a Gurdwara, a Sikh place of worship, after going to pray for the victims of the attacks. Individuals being fired on the spot because they wore turbans and beards. People being profiled by law enforcement. And then things sort of spiraled.

We started seeing more and more of these types of emails blasting out that the Sikh community, the Muslim community, the broader AAPI community, the brown community, was going to be under attack in the aftermath of what happened on 9/11. As I drove home that day, I quite literally drove past the Pentagon on one of the roads that was not locked off, and I was driven off the side of the road by a guy in a pickup truck waving his arms and yelling racial epithets. Thankfully I safely pulled over and he kept going, and I got home, and I just had this overwhelming sense of emotion flood over me that nothing was going to be the same. But it was also a feeling that something had to be done. So later that night and into the morning of September 12th, we finally had phone service and we were able to call one another, and I actually started to organize a group of young Sikh Americans, those who had been born here or grown up here, who understood the political climate and understood how media worked.

We were a pretty small group, and we came together and we looked at one another and we said, we need to do something and we need to do it now, because people are getting hurt and someone's going to be killed. And sadly, as we organized in those first few days, by the weekend after 9/11, what we were seeing, a Sikh man was shot and killed at his gas station in Mesa, Arizona, by a self-proclaimed patriot who came and shot and killed him. And so the Sikh Coalition was quite literally born on 9/11. We didn't have an NAACP in the Sikh community, or an ADL.

We had some broader AAPI advocacy organizations. South Asian Americans Leading Together was also very new, but there really wasn't a dedicated civil rights organization for the issues and challenges the Sikh community was going to face. So we brought together as a coalition all of these loose and formal groups of folks in the Northeast, the tri-state area, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, in the D.C. metro area, folks in Chicago, out in the Bay Area, in the Pacific Northwest. And we came together with a core group of about a dozen volunteers, some of whom were lawyers, some were law students, some were like me, planning to go to law school, some were in business, some were in media.

And we tried to bring all of these skills that we had as a group together to create this organization called the Sikh Coalition. And so that's where we started.

Khurram Naik: Yeah, I think that's an incredible story. And it's interesting that, like you're saying, there are roots of it that were obviously antecedent to 9/11, and there's a reason why you were able to find these different people so quickly, which is that of course there are ties there. And it's interesting that this is this crystallizing event. And I wonder if that's kind of distorting for you, because obviously the whole point is that there's no connection between the Sikh community and 9/11. So it's got to be kind of strange to have this important thing in your life as a practice of some external thing that has nothing to do with Sikhs.

Amandeep Sidhu: No, I think that's a very fair point. With the turban and beard, I've always been a very visible religious minority. And we talk about, in the diversity, equity and inclusion circles, the idea of covering, the idea of your inauthentic versus your authentic self in the workplace, right? The reality is that as a Sikh with the turban on my head, it's all out there. Whatever workplace I'm in, whatever social event or social venue I'm in, I'm very visible, as are all members of the Sikh faith.

And the association between the turban and terrorism predated 9/11. I remember as a kid growing up, the comments about my dad being a genie or being a magician or being a wizard. It was frustrating and annoying as a kid, but it also was so lighthearted in comparison to the association with terrorism. And it really was the first Gulf War in the late 80s, early 90s, that it really crystallized, when, sadly, that movement began to gain prominence, and its leaders very visibly wore turbans and members of that movement visibly wore turbans.

And so that association between terrorism and turban was sort of born in that time period, from the Ayatollah Khomeini to that first Gulf War, and it really went from there. That was the first time that I started to hear the Osama racial epithets and the towelhead racial epithets, and crossing the parking lot with my dad in Richmond for my cousin's birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese's, and having a car pull up in front of us and a couple of kids pop their heads out and yell, go back to your country and take that thing off your head. And so it predated 9/11. And so we as a community were organized loosely in a way to respond to that.

There was an organization dedicated to tracking media depictions of members of the Sikh faith, what was happening in mass media, what was happening in the news, whether Sikhs were being accurately depicted in those media portrayals. But that wasn't the civil rights legal response that the community really needed desperately after 9/11. So there were a lot of like-minded individuals who had, in our own ways, done this kind of work in our local communities.

And thankfully we had some folks who had done it on a bigger scale. One of our co-founders, who became the first full-time employee, first legal director, and first executive director of the Coalition, was in that co-founder group. At the time of 9/11, he was doing his LLM in international human rights. He'd often tell the story of how, as he studied for his LLM, he never expected that the work he would be doing afterwards would be with the Sikh community in the United States.

He thought the Sikh community, maybe in Punjab, back in India, other communities around the world, but then he dedicated the next decade of his life to working with the Sikh Coalition to build it up. And so we had resources like that, where these were people who were educated and trained to do this kind of work. And then folks like me, who went back to law school and came out in 2005, so four years after 9/11, able to jump in then as a very new lawyer and support the effort.

Khurram Naik: And so give me a breakdown of what your organization aimed to do and accomplish in the first three or six months of its existence?

Amandeep Sidhu: So this is not unique to the Sikh community. I think it's endemic to the entire South Asian community, and perhaps even the broader AAPI community. We felt really bad about asking the community for money until we had proven ourselves. And so very deliberately, we did not want to go to the community and say, help us fund this organization, without having actually proven ourselves as being effective at doing something to help the community.

That was number one. Number two was we had seen the weakness of organizations built around a single personality, an individual-driven organization where it was this person's organization or that person's organization, whatever that might look like. That wasn't going to work. And so we wanted it to be flat. And we went out and we set up meetings with DOJ and with the Department of Transportation, before the TSA even existed.

And members of Congress, and we sort of had a checklist of things we needed to do. It was putting the issues of hate crimes on the radar of the Bush administration and local and state governments where the larger Sikh communities existed and the law enforcement associated with those efforts. It was going to Congress and getting recognition of what the Sikh community was facing. So we pushed for a resolution to be passed by both the House and Senate that, for the first time in U.S. history, actually enumerated what it means to be a Sikh, what that identity looks like, what the backlash looked like, in terms of hate crimes and employment and discrimination and airport profiling, but also very deliberately sent a message that we weren't going to isolate ourselves as being Sikh and that it was okay to go after these other communities.

The message was never "we're not Muslim." It was always "we are Sikh, and these types of crimes against any community, whether it's Sikh or Muslim or Arab or any other community, are wrong, and we need to help you understand who we are." And so we had a couple of those touchpoints where we had real recognition from the Bush administration of what was happening in the Sikh community, meaningful changes around airport profiling policy on what would happen when a Sikh went through security, or incidents where without even setting off an alarm, a Sikh was asked to remove his turban, which we felt was akin to a strip search and completely unacceptable. And so we helped to shape policies and procedures that recognized security concerns but also respected the Sikh articles of faith.

And we got that resolution passed in the House and Senate that really did crystallize, again, the unique circumstances of that mistaken identity and backlash that was facing the Sikh community. And we focused on getting well-trained and articulate resources available for media appearances and on the news, so that when issues happened, we had Sikh voices to speak to those issues, and then created the legal resource structure to help the community respond. And so it was very much still a volunteer organization, out of our trunks, out of our apartments, out of the after-hours conference rooms of the companies we worked at, that we organized in that first year. But we felt like we had enough that we went to the community and we held an event in Washington in the spring of 2002, where we honored and recognized all of those elected officials and other organizations from the broader South Asian community and AAPI community that supported the Sikh community and helped us. And that was sort of our coming out as an organization and our first real significant fundraising effort.

The summer between finishing my consulting gig and starting law school, I helped write the first grant application for the Coalition, and we got a decent-sized grant that allowed us to open our doors in a very small one-room office in Chinatown in New York, and eventually hire our first full-time employee. And now it's grown to four cities and 24 full-time staff, and it's become the national organization that it is now.

Khurram Naik: Is there anything about the efficacy of the organization, let's say one year in, how the efficacy of the organization in terms of output per employee, or some other metric like that, compared to the organization today? And would there be any advantages to being smaller back then compared to today?

Amandeep Sidhu: There certainly weren't advantages, right? There's strength in numbers, there's strength in spreading resources around. And so if you look at the Coalition as it exists today, it spans across a number of buckets, around legal resources, around community outreach and community building, capacity building, education, media, advocacy beyond the legal advocacy, the other forms of advocacy that are out there.

That was all happening basically with the one full-time person and then a bunch of other volunteers. So slowly over time, things that were happening in a voluntary capacity have shifted to full-time staff who are able to dedicate 100% of their time to doing that work. So when I graduated from law school in 2005, I went into a clerkship, and that actually forced me to have to go on pause for the first time after 9/11. I couldn't really publicly be out and about on behalf of the Coalition during my clerkship.

But then when I joined my first law firm, McDermott Will & Emery, I brought on the Coalition as a pro bono client of the firm. Very unique at the time. Not a lot of law firms were doing work in the religious rights space back then. They weren't touching anything related to the Muslim community with a 10-foot pole. And so by extension, the issues of the Sikh community and the issues we were facing were really in that same bucket.

And we made the case that this was an issue that was affecting kids with school bullying, and that it was aligned with the firm's child-first pro bono initiative, and that this made sense. And so I brought in the Coalition, and a lot of the stuff that I would have done on my own just as a volunteer, attending those meetings with DOJ, attending the meetings with TSA, going up on the Hill, I was able to do for a pro bono client and build those pro bono hours and bring other people into the fold and be part of that effort.

And so what ended up happening is that while it was by no means full-time, it was one more resource that the organization had, through a pro bono lawyer. And we tried to replicate that in a number of ways, where some of the biggest cases that the Sikh Coalition took on early on required the support of outside pro bono legal resources. So taking on the NYPD and its discriminatory policies against turban-wearing Sikhs, that was Ravi Bhalla, who's now the mayor of Hoboken, his private law firm coordinating with the Coalition on a pro bono basis to take on that case.

And so that was one of the ways we grew. Something's happening on a pro bono or low bono basis, where somebody has a media consulting firm and they want to support the effort, they have a web design firm and they want to support the Coalition, they have a law firm that wants to support on a pro bono basis. How do we make that happen? And so that's what happened for years and years and years. And over time, it's finally at a place where there are director-level staff who are running those programs now at the Coalition, and they have staff underneath them supporting their efforts, all of which was happening on a voluntary basis for the better part of the first 15 years of the organization.

Khurram Naik: Yeah, I want to explore that more, because it seems like you're really skilled at persuading lots of kinds of organizations and stakeholders. So I want to explore that some more. Maybe as an aside, on the subject of law firms and pro bono efforts, what are some of the opportunities or gaps you've seen from, let's say, large law firms and how they approach pro bono? What are some of the ways you think they can be longer-term oriented, or think about the upside in ways that they're not currently? Because I think you've had a perspective on this for a large chunk of time, on the benefits to an organization of investing in pro bono. And maybe we can even start there, and you can speak to, say, McDermott, what were the benefits McDermott experienced from the amount of resources it dedicated to the Sikh Coalition, and then what can other law firms learn from how to direct their resources to advocacy groups they're not thinking about now?

Amandeep Sidhu: Absolutely. I think it's a very timely question, because I think a lot of law firms, particularly after the death of George Floyd and the focus on the BLM movement and a recognition by law firms of the need to focus dedicated resources and attention on social justice and racial justice issues, we're at an inflection point where firms that wouldn't have touched these issues 10 years ago, or even five years ago, are looking very closely at how they can be more impactful, including Winston & Strawn, where I am now.

It is very much a part of the conversation. When I started at McDermott, it was very much the blind leading the blind, and I was the blind and the follower. There was nobody before me. So I think back to my decision to go down the path of law school, which was driven in many ways by my first mentor in the legal field, Gurbir Grewal, who's the outgoing Attorney General of New Jersey and the incoming head of enforcement litigation for the SEC.

He was in law school when I was an undergrad at William & Mary, and that was my first real exposure to what being a law student would look like and what eventually being a lawyer would look like. And he came to a big firm in D.C. He was the first person I knew who would be in that environment. So when I started to think about what my next chapter was going to look like, a law firm was never on the radar.

I thought it was government service in some capacity. Maybe it was some larger nonprofit than the Coalition, or maybe parlaying that skill set back to the Coalition. If there was a scenario where I could go directly work for the Coalition, that was percolating as a possibility. I remember sitting down with the members of the board, and they handed me a stack of grant applications and the Skadden Fellowship, and they were like, you're coming to work for the Coalition.

And I just had this itching in the back of my head that maybe there's something different, and it was born out of, I think I need to be a better lawyer. I'm not going to be the best lawyer I can be if I jump right into this brand-new organization we just created with one lawyer on staff. I could be a better lawyer if I at least spent a few years training and becoming a better lawyer. So when I went to McDermott first, the pitch was, this is what I want to do anyway.

This is something I'm passionate about. It's time I'd like to spend, whether it's 5%, whether it's 7%, whatever that bucket looks like. I think it was like 100 billable hours back then out of my 2000. Maybe it jumped up to 200 at some point. It was what I wanted to do.

And so to be able to do that for my own community, with an organization that was doing it very professionally, that was awesome. But what it turned into was this incredible opportunity for me to grow as a lawyer and raise my own profile, both in the firm and outside, but also raise the firm's profile. So to go to your question: in 2009, the Coalition came to me and said, we're about to take on the U.S. military. We're going to take on two clients who have been told that they have to shave and take off their turbans to continue their service in the U.S. Army. And we're going to take on their cases, and we likely will have to litigate. Will your firm partner with us on what could be a multi-year effort?

And I went to the firm's leadership and we made the pitch. I said, this is not going to be a quick one-and-done situation, this is going to take years. And the firm, to its credit, said, absolutely, we support that effort and we want you to do it. And so as a fourth-year associate, I put together a team of four or five partners and six or seven associates, and it was the head of our government strategies practice, the head of the labor and employment practice, a couple of other litigators, a bunch of associates.

And we helped architect this campaign that is now in its twelfth year, as we have pushed for the end of religious discrimination in the U.S. military. And so I won't tell that whole story right now, but the long and short of it is that by the time I left McDermott last year, the firm had committed somewhere in the vicinity of three or four million dollars, three and a half, almost four million dollars, of pro bono services to the Sikh Coalition. I translated that all over to Winston, with the same commitment from the firm to continue that work, and the work continues at Winston & Strawn with the same level of vigor and commitment to provide resources and bring in other attorneys as we need.

And so when you think about force multipliers, that's an organization that back in 2009, at a half-a-million-dollar budget, we were adding a hundred thousand dollars to that number. And by the time I left, two years ago, one, on a two-million-dollar budget, we were adding half a million dollars every year to that bottom line. And that makes a big difference. It makes a huge difference in what the organization can accomplish.

It adds a lot of credibility, right? It's not just this little organization, the Sikh Coalition. It's an international law firm behind the effort. It allowed for me to get more people involved at the firm. And it brought a lot of very positive press. So those were the types of cases that were getting New York Times stories and Washington Post stories and CBS Evening News video clips. And so to be able to demonstrate to the firm, this is not just one man's pet project, but it is something that is actually raising the firm's profile, that makes a big difference.

Khurram Naik: And so what did McDermott convey to you? I mean, they said to you, hey, we value the profile we're getting from this. What did they convey to you about the benefit they perceived in supporting the Sikh Coalition?

Amandeep Sidhu: So it was twofold, right? I was an associate when this all started. And thankfully, I got some good advice very early on. My wife is also a lawyer. She had been in big law before she shifted into the nonprofit world many, many years ago. She's at Amnesty International now. But her time in big law taught her one thing, and that was, bill your hours, do good work, get good reviews. Don't fall short of the expectations that come with working at a business. And that advice was reinforced by some of my early mentors at McDermott. And so I always hit my hours.

I always did really great work. And I also carved out my niche. My day job is healthcare and life sciences, and I do litigation, investigations, compliance, and regulatory work in that space. And I love what I do. And so I was able to build my practice while also in parallel building this work around the Coalition. And what that demonstrated to the firm is that this was not a distraction from contributing to the bottom line. But more than that, the media coverage, the awards, we got the National Law Journal Pro Bono Award one year, and other organizations gave us recognition over the years. That all matters. That's stuff that goes into the calculus of what the firm is able to say about its commitment when it comes to hiring summer associates and lateral recruits and everything else under the sun.

So a law firm is political, and I thankfully figured that out early enough that I knew how I needed to do it. It couldn't just be selfishly driven by what I wanted to do or what I thought the Coalition needed. It was taking all of that into account, while also recognizing that I was an associate, and then ultimately a partner, at a profit-driven organization that wants to do the right thing and help our communities and contribute, but also is there to make money. And so this was a way to spotlight the firm in a unique way that was very much appreciated. So I was promoted to partner right on time. And this was a big part of my visibility. I had gone to the partner retreat as an associate with one of my clients from the Sikh Coalition as one of their keynote speakers, to talk about this pro bono work. And so when I was up for partner that year, people knew who I was. And it wasn't just this guy in D.C. It was the guy who had been in the New York Times story, who was at the partner retreat, who was doing all this great work, and by the way is killing it on hours and getting good reviews and people like working with him. And I think this is somebody we want to have in the partnership.

Khurram Naik: And so if an organization approaches, if there's someone who's really involved in an organization similar to your circumstances, and they say to you, I want to learn how to get more people involved with this pro bono approach, I want to get my law firm to buy in the way that, you know, the firms you've gone into bought in to the Sikh Coalition, is there just a high-level bullet-point framework you would tell someone for how to think about them, how to approach that?

Amandeep Sidhu: Absolutely. I think most large law firms, even some of the medium and smaller firms, will have someone who's dedicated to the pro bono program, whether it's a dedicated pro bono director or a partner who wears that dual hat. So I would approach him or her and talk about the organization, understanding kind of where the focus has been. What does the firm do right now? Where is the focus of the pro bono efforts right now?

What kinds of organizations are serving as referral sources? What kinds of cases have they worked on? Is it just sort of the traditional landlord-tenant and other forms of garden-variety work? Or is the firm doing work in the impact, social justice space already? Is there already a hook for what you're trying to do, or is it just a complete outlier? But then you have that conversation with whoever is in charge of pro bono and you just explain, this is the organization that I'm really passionate about, this is what they do, I think these are the types of cases we could be working on.

You know, start small. With the Coalition, it was the single bullying case of a kid. It was the single advocacy effort around a policy change. It wasn't, you know, the knock-it-out-of-the-park, 12-year, multi-office religious discrimination in the military case. It was, let's start small, let's grow, let's prove that this is an organization we like working with as a law firm, and then go from there. And if you have a head of diversity, equity and inclusion, or someone who wears that hat, approach her or him and talk about what this means in terms of impact.

If there's that DEI hook, right? At the end of the day, part of the hook for the Coalition work is that this is sort of teaching diversity through osmosis. I don't have to go and explain the Sikh faith to the 2,500 lawyers at the law firm and all of the staff. We can circulate the New York Times story. We can circulate the news clip from the evening news the day before, as part of the routine circulation of information about what's happening in the firm, and people's eyes are open.

And they say, okay, I see that guy, I've seen him in the office, or I've seen him on the website, now I know a little bit about his community, and I'm both educated and maybe I'm interested in helping in some way. And I think that's what I've experienced even in the last year and a half at Winston, that we've taken some of these inflection points, around George Floyd and BLM, around the Atlanta shooting, the attacks on the AAPI community and the environment of COVID, and used those as opportunities to share our experiences with our peers.

And we can do that a lot more efficiently when we're doing things using technology. But that level of opening eyes to the unique experiences and perspectives that we bring to the organization, it makes us stronger. And so I think there are all of these different angles you can pitch. But I would say you start with whoever runs pro bono, whoever runs diversity, equity, inclusion. Those are your two allies and they will be your best resource in helping to frame that organization and potentially that first project that allows you to bring in the organization.

Khurram Naik: Yeah, I love your comment on the incidental benefits on DEI, because so many things about DEI try to approach the subject head-on, and even to receptive ears, there's just so much information you can process, or capacity you have to process. And I like your point about this being another form, another vehicle for conveying these thoughts and principles to some people to say, okay, this is what it means to have a Sikh colleague, this is what it means to understand what it would be like to make a law firm that is welcoming to Sikhs, and where society is welcoming to Sikhs. And then of course, not just Sikhs, but other groups too, just being more thoughtful about what inclusion actually looks like for the person down the hall who's doing good things. I really liked that a lot. I think about, say, with what Panic Cooler is doing, it's the same premise there. That organization is not designed to directly influence law firms, but through connecting South Asian lawyers with each other and creating more opportunities for South Asian lawyers, I think that is the path that I'm seeing there. So it's interesting that you were able to successfully do that. But I mean, I think you need both. I think you need self-organizing entities that kind of do that circulation. It's early days of relying on, say, somebody who wanted to dedicate pro bono SEO services or something like that, or website design, to getting stakeholders outside of your community. I think that's an important transition. So with law firms in general, do you have a point of view on what are the opportunities for law firms to think in these terms for taking on pro bono work? I mean, ultimately, I think it's going to come from an individual, like you're saying, somebody who has a passion for a subject, and that's what's driving them to this. But I don't know if you have a point of view on, in this era today, what are some of the big opportunities that firms could be taking on, or where are the new frontiers in pro bono work that you see?

Amandeep Sidhu: Certainly. I think having someone that has a personal connection and passion just makes the work that much more meaningful and valuable for the organization. We're at this place where there's been a huge focus on finding civil rights organizations in Black and brown communities to support. There are a lot of firms that have never touched this and all of a sudden want to jump right in.

And that's fine. And these are organizations generally that are not going to shun the resources of a billion-dollar law firm. But it makes it a lot more personal if there's a connection, right? A connection between the people who are working on it, leading the effort, and the organization. Because I think that builds loyalty, that a person at the firm is committing resources to something that he or she is passionate about.

And so that, I think, is the most natural way to see that kind of work grow. For the larger organizations that truly have referral networks, right? Like the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, where if you're a big firm in D.C. or anywhere around the country, you can be on their listserv, and you're going to get the distribution every week of the three or four or five or ten cases they've got in the door.

And the first one to grab it gets it. And you may be able to keep it if you've got the right team, or maybe you pass if you don't think you have the right people, but you do it that way. And not every organization is there. The Coalition is not there, right? It's every few weeks, or maybe it's once a month, but there's something new where they're going out and bringing in pro bono resources from the field to support the effort. But I'd say, thinking about it as an organization, as a firm, where your passions are going to lie should be driven by the people. So I'll take Winston as an example. After the death of George Floyd, in that aftermath, we created a racial justice and equity task force.

So separate from our diversity and inclusion committee, which I serve on, we created this separate task force focused very specifically, not just on what the firm could do organizationally outside of the firm to support the Black community. And that was financial commitments to support certain organizations. It was also, how do we increase the amount of pro bono work we're doing with organizations in the Black community and in the civil rights community? And also, what are we doing internally to retain and promote Black associates and Black partners?

And so it was very specific, very deliberate, very focused on not just what do we do externally and visibly, from the "we want to look good as a law firm" perspective, which you can kind of chalk up to a lot of firms saying a lot of good things and throwing a lot of money. But what can we really meaningfully do, not just in the near term, but in the long term? And then how do we introspectively look at what we need to be doing differently to actually change the organization, right? Like, how do we ensure that we don't see that migration of mid-level or senior Black associates, that we don't see lateral movement when partners don't feel like they're getting leadership opportunities? What do we need to fix as an organization to actually move the needle?

And so I'd say firms need to take that kind of pause and careful look to say, okay, what are we doing that's visibly nice versus actually going to make a difference for our organization and for the legal industry more broadly?

Khurram Naik: What do you think is the most promising or impressive thing that Winston is doing on the DEI front?

Amandeep Sidhu: So I think there are a couple of things. One is we have a mentorship program that pairs partner-track associates with members of the executive committee as dedicated sponsors for their ascension to partnership.

So if you are on track with your reviews and your experiences, and you're hitting all of the right notes to be promotable, and Winston is a one-tier partnership, you're going straight to equity partner, then you're paired up with a member of the executive committee, someone who clearly has influence and the ability to help guide you to that final stretch of getting promoted.

Coming in, I came in obviously as a partner when I lateraled over, but I was really impressed with that. That's something that's been around for a couple of years. And David Rogers, the head of the D.C. office, talked about that when we first met with him, when we were considering Winston, and that really impressed me.

Now, that predated everything, right, before 2020. What we've done in the aftermath of 2020 is the program I just described, where we're very deliberately looking at the differentials in experiences that Black and brown associates have versus non-diverse associates. And how do we fix that gap, right? How do you adjust for the scenario where everyone comes in on unequal footing the first year of associate, but within six months, nine months, 12 months, 18 months, two years, white associates have more hours than Asian associates and Hispanic associates and Black associates, and it's a trickle-down. It's not happening because they don't have the education or the skills and the ability to succeed. It's happening because of unconscious bias. It's happening because that one assignment gets shoved over to the white associate versus the diverse associate, and that sort of creates this slow decline of experience, so that the diverse associate is at a deficit two years in, and three years in, and four years in, and it just builds upon itself.

And so we've put in place an assignment coordination and management system where everything is run through a process, and it's no longer a sheer entrepreneurial, eat-what-you-can-kill environment as an associate, where it depends on who you've become in relationship with at the senior associate or partner level. It is a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month monitoring to say, how are these experiences actually lining up, and is Bob getting more experiences than Sally, and how do we adjust for that to make sure that they are getting equal opportunity? Now, obviously, there are always going to be associates at every level, and of every background, who aren't going to cut it and are going to get filtered out over time because it's not the right fit for them. But it shouldn't be because they are not getting the opportunities that their peers are getting at a greater pace.

Khurram Naik: So I want to go back to the Sikh Coalition, because I'm curious about how the organization has changed over time. What would you say is different about the mission today than the mission, let's say, 10 years ago?

Amandeep Sidhu: So it's interesting, because the mission really hasn't changed. It's the level of resources and the ability to actually achieve some of those changes. That's really what has changed. The catchphrase that we associated with the name, the Sikh Coalition, was "the voice of the people," right, that we were the voice of the Sikh American community in all these different environments and spheres. And there was only so much that the organization could do out of that one room in Chinatown with one full-time employee, and then it became two, and then it was three, and then it was five, and now it's grown to the 20-plus member staff that exists now.

And so I'll take education, for example. In education, it was sort of a scattershot of one person or two people or three dealing with all of the other issues on the legal front and on the advocacy front, with hate crimes and profiling and employment discrimination, and then the underlying issue of how do you change perceptions, community by community, county by county, city by city, state by state, and then nationally? It can't just be top-down, it also has to be bottom-up. And so I think back to my upbringing in Richmond, Virginia. We didn't talk about the Sikh faith in school. I didn't learn about the Sikh faith the same way I learned about Christianity, Judaism, Islam. It just wasn't in the textbook.

And so how do you fix that? Interestingly, there are a handful of school districts around the country that actually dictate content for the textbooks because of their size. So you've got Texas, and they drive content for textbooks around the country. And so the Coalition dedicated a full-time staff member to basically live in Texas for a couple of years, a few years back, five or six years ago now, it's been a while, and was on the ground every day lobbying the school board members down there about the importance of including accurate content on the Sikh faith. Because just as bad as no content is inaccurate content. And sadly, there are a lot of driving forces around subsuming Sikhism as a sect or an offshoot of other faiths, and not an independent faith of its own with this unique background of beliefs and identity. And so that was also in play.

And so that change, and then you add to that going state by state as curriculums are revised over the years. They have successfully lobbied for changes to textbooks and curriculum guidance for social studies in, and I'm probably getting this wrong, but call it 10 or 12 states. So it's several states in which that change has now happened. Several are underway. Virginia is one that's currently under reconsideration, where that is not part of the textbooks, and they're pushing really hard. That never could have happened without having the three full-time staff members that are in that education program at the Coalition.

Think about the legal efforts that are happening with four, I think five now, four full-time lawyers, one part-time lawyer. And so with that level of resources, and the legal director, Amrith Kaur, is a former county prosecutor. She's someone who's literally litigated some of the thorniest, craziest cases you can imagine. To have that kind of talent heading the legal department of the Coalition, and having that kind of leadership, the kinds of cases that they can take on, the level of impact they can have in those cases, the cases they can get resolved on settlement because they have such a powerhouse to be able to just walk into the room and have the other side just sort of fold over and say, okay, we're going to lose, how do we get out of this? That wouldn't have happened, right? We would have had to fight tooth and nail, because it was quite literally the little guy in the room that the government did not have to worry about.

And so I'm really proud of the reputation the Coalition has built, which is one that even as an organization that has grown substantially, is still tiny in comparison to its peers, right? Compared to the ADL, compared to the NAACP, there's no comparison in terms of the size and resources of the organization. The Coalition is very well respected in those circles as doing incredibly competent work and being tremendous advocates and getting shit done, right? I mean, that's at the end of the day. The proof is in the pudding, and what have we accomplished as an organization, and the list is very long on what's actually been done.

Khurram Naik: What do you think is the most impressive accomplishment of the Coalition?

Amandeep Sidhu: So there's a lot. I'm obviously a bit biased, since I've been so involved in the military campaign. And it may not necessarily be the most significant change, because the education change, that's going to take decades to actually see the results of that effort. And the generation that comes behind us, they're going to be the ones that benefit from a situation where they grow up with peers who actually learn why we wear a turban or why we have long hair. And you can't measure at this point in time how much of an impact that's going to have. But when I look at the military campaign, and I've been privileged to be part of that for the last 12 years, we pushed really hard to avoid litigation.

We had two clients in 2009. We were able to get them individual accommodations that allowed them to serve with turbans and beards without having to shave and violate their religious practice. And we very strategically wanted them to prove the concept, that these guys could groom their beards in a way that would allow them to be neat and conservative, which is the buzzword around uniformity in the military. They could wear a gas mask and conform safety gear to their face, which they could. They would take off their full turban and wear a small under-turban to wear a helmet for safety reasons, another big concern. They'd wear a camo turban when they were out in the field deployed, wear a black or maybe blue turban when they were in their dress uniforms. So we went down this list of, how do we prove the concept? And then in 2010, we were able to get an individual accommodation for the first enlisted Sikh in a generation. And these three guys basically were the test cases, and they were chosen as our clients because we knew that they passed the rigorous scrutiny of being able to withstand discrimination and all the things we expected they might experience.

And they did really well. They deployed to Afghanistan, two of them deployed to Afghanistan, they came back with several awards. And then it was as if the Army had said, this experiment was great, but we're not going to expand it any further. So we got to 2014, we had a few more clients that faced kind of, you know, what I'll describe as bullshit pushbacks, that didn't end up being ones that we were going to litigate, but they still were pushed back in a way that was frustrating and indicative of a desire not to move the needle.

And then in 2015, 2016, that was really a turning point. We were approached by an individual named Captain Simratpal Singh, whose nickname is Simmer. This is the guy who went to West Point when he was graduating from high school in 2007, so two years before we started this campaign, and he showed up at West Point with the turban and beard, having seen that there had been Sikhs who served throughout the 20th century with turbans and beards, and thought, okay, I'll be fine. And naively thought, okay, I'll be fine.

So he shipped to West Point and they said, shave your beard, cut your hair, take off your turban, or go home. And so he reluctantly and with a very heavy heart decided to shave and cut his hair. And so he lost his identity, went to West Point, graduated, became an Army Ranger, deployed. Decorated, a true soldier and officer in the U.S. Army, and he came to an event at the Pentagon. This was for Vaisakhi, the Sikh holiday, the spring harvest festival and celebration of the Khalsa.

And so the Pentagon was actually hosting an event for Sikh service members celebrating the Sikh holiday, and all of our turban-wearing Sikh clients were in attendance, and Captain Singh was in his uniform, but clean-shaven and with his haircut. He came up to me, and he figured through where I was placed in the room that I was one of the lawyers, and he said, how did they do that? How are those guys wearing turbans? And so I gave him the five-minute version, and I said, let's talk some more.

And he became our client. And we helped him ultimately get his accommodation, allowed him to keep his hair and his turban. We ended up having to litigate his case in 2016, along with the case of three others. There was a separate lawsuit, both of which we successfully resolved with the Army.

And then we expected that the election might go one way in 2016, and it ended up going in a very different direction. And we were sort of at a crossroads, where we had every expectation that we might be moving towards a global DOD-wide change. And that didn't, you know, we knew that was not going to happen in the Trump administration, but Eric Fanning, who was the first openly gay Secretary of the Army, he was the Secretary of the Army at the time. He essentially made the issue of religious accommodation in the Army one of the final issues he wanted to hit before he left office.

So between November of 2016 and January of 2017, he worked behind the scenes, we provided whatever resources we could and information, and in January of 2017, the Army issued a new policy that effectively opened the doors to Sikhs. So the extraordinary resources we had to put into those seven accommodations that had come before, or through the end of 2016, millions of dollars of pro bono resources from outside law firms, the organization dedicated a huge chunk of its budget and time and resources to this effort. All of a sudden, the Army had a policy that opened the door, that if you were an observant Sikh with a turban and beard, you could request an accommodation, and if your beliefs were sincere and you agreed to groom your beard and wear the right color turban with your uniform, you were able to get that accommodation. The diagrams that we had been putting in front of the Army for 10 years, or nine, eight, nine years at that point, those ended up in the policy, right, the style of turban, the way that official insignia would be affixed to the front of the turban, the way the beard would be groomed. It was everything we had pushed for, we actually got in the Army. And so now there are over 60 turban-wearing, observant Sikh service members in the U.S. Army. The Air Force followed suit in 2019 with its own policy that opened the door, and there are three or four observant Sikhs with turbans and beards serving in the U.S. Air Force. In 2017, we got the first two Sikh male cadets in U.S. history with turbans and beards at West Point, and they just graduated this past spring. And we continue to fight, we're still fighting the Marines, we're still fighting the Navy.

But when I think about the lives that were changed, whether it's those individual clients or the many that I've never met, and to know that the organization accomplished that, and I was a little part of that, is huge. And so that's what I would say is impactful, and I say it not just because of the military piece. All of this along the way, and part of the rationale for the Coalition focusing so much of its time and effort on this, is that this is an employment discrimination issue. It's an employment discrimination issue because the U.S. military, DOD, is the largest employer in the world, and if it dictates to any employer globally that has a uniform policy that they're going to exclude turban-wearing Sikhs from serving, then we're going to exclude them from being security guards or law enforcement officers or whatever it might be, even the back room or the front office of UPS. I mean, you can go down the list of all these different employment discrimination cases where one of the early arguments was, well, if the military doesn't let you do it, why would we?

And so this is a big issue, because if we break down this barrier, it has the ability to break down all those other barriers.

Khurram Naik: One detail I really like is that the policy manual for the Army includes the figures that you designed. I think that's another great piece of accuracy, that it seems like you've tried, in this form of advocacy and the internal advocacy you had at law firms you've been at, you've made it easy for people to agree with you, because you're making their lives easier. You say, hey, I've already done this work, here's what the turban will look like in compliance with the uniform, and so forth. So I think that's a really interesting bit of persuasion that seems to be the core theme in the work that you've done.

Amandeep Sidhu: It is, and we can't take full credit for actually doing these drawings. We lifted them out of the policy that exists in Canada and the policy that exists in the UK and the policy that exists in India, where, you know, in India it's not really a policy, right, it's just, you serve, there are no boxes that need to be checked. But Canada, the first Sikh defense minister, all of this was happening in the background, that you've got quite literally the Secretary of Defense equivalent just north of the border who wears the turban and beard and serves alongside our American soldiers abroad in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and we're telling Sikhs in the U.S. they can't. So the irony was there. But the diagrams were taking what was already out there, right, that this is our allies who've been doing this for decades, we can do the exact same thing here.

And we put together model policy and model guidance. We did our research. This never required any legislative change. Congress actually made it clear back in the late 80s, early 90s that it intended for the military to accommodate not just observant members of the Jewish faith but also Sikhs and Muslims, and the latter two just never happened, right, the Army and the other branches just never fully adopted the guideposts that Congress tried to put in place in the late 80s. And so we knew that all this would take was convincing quite literally the people in the room making the decision that this was not just the right thing to do, but that it could be done in a way that didn't compromise any of those very real concerns about safety and uniformity and esprit de corps and unit cohesion and all these military rationales for wanting to have some uniformity in the service. But that doesn't mean that everyone is exactly the same, and it doesn't mean you can't accommodate difference.

Khurram Naik: Yeah, I like that a lot, and I really like how you spelled out the broader impact on who are the other entities that look to the Department of Defense. You can just see you're at the tip of this really huge pyramid. I think that's another theme, if you're thinking about any direction you want to go, just finding the smallest ingress or egress, however you want to put it, or a wedge issue, and just kind of growing from there. I like that theme a lot as well. Let me ask you this, because you talked earlier about the efficacy of the Sikh Coalition compared to, or in the context of, some of its older and larger, better-funded peers. So I'm curious, for the South Asian bar, what are the things that the South Asian bar, South Asian lawyers, can learn from the Sikh Coalition in terms of efficacy, impact, connectedness? What are the principles you think are generally applicable to this adjacent community to the Sikh community?

Amandeep Sidhu: So, given where we are 20 years out from 9/11, our parents' generation was one where there was, I think, a lot of siloing between religious communities coming from South Asia. The Sikh community generally stayed in its silo, and the Hindu community in its silo, and the Muslim community in its silo. And, you know, my parents had a lot of friends across all of those silos, but not everyone does, right, as a general rule. People kind of stayed in their bucket. And so a lot of those tensions that arose out of Partition and everything that came in the decades after carried over to the U.S., and some of those prejudices and perceptions around the Sikh community, around the Hindu community, around the Muslim community, that carried over. And what was really awful about what happened after 9/11 is that all of those walls sort of fell apart, generally, right. There were certainly different organizations and individuals that subscribed to those prejudices, but as a general rule, those differences fell away in our generation. And so one of our biggest allies early on was South Asian Americans Leading Together. Their executive director at the time, they were not that far ahead of the Coalition, right, they were also voluntary, she was at DOJ at the time. She ended up being their first full-time person when she left DOJ and they raised the money to open an office.

She helped us open a ton of doors. Members of the Muslim community and different organizations over time, they've been tremendous allies as we've navigated these various issues. And so what I'd say is that the lesson to learn from the Coalition really isn't a lesson from the Coalition. It's just a reflection on what has actually happened over the last 20 years, which is just a lot of openness to collaboration and support for these issues, right. As we've done this work in the military, our clients were all Sikh, but the mission was never to accommodate only Sikhs, right. The policy that changed in 2017 equally applied to observant Muslims and other religious minorities that had any form of religious headwear or facial hair. And so we always pushed for the greatest possible scenario, where it wasn't just going to be the Sikh community that benefited, but the broader religious community, the broader South Asian community.

And so I think the Coalition has done a really, really good job of navigating the community and the waters that were, quite frankly, muddied by our parents' generation. And, you know, my parents are in that generation. They were leaders in their local communities and did great things and have done great things and continue to do great things. But generationally, not everyone plays nice in the sandbox, and there are expectations about what it means to have an impact, right? Is it just the photo op? Is it just getting the picture with President Bush or the picture with President Obama? Or is it actually getting the work done? And so the Coalition has always focused on just getting the work done, and if the other stuff happens as a side benefit, sure. It's not about the glory, it's about actually changing people's lives. And so I think that focus on the work, focus on actually making an impact, rather than focusing on who's in the news, who's getting the press, who's in the press release, I mean, all these things still happen, but I've been very impressed with the Coalition as it's grown from a founder-run organization to where we are now. It has been a very mature and level-headed organization, and the leadership continues to follow that mantra today.

Khurram Naik: So it strikes me, going back to some of what you talked about early on in the conversation, that now there are new forms of awareness about diversity and inclusion, and you're saying there are concepts of, where you're showing up at work as your whole self, or however we want to frame that, and you're saying, hey, like, I have no choice, this is, I wear a turban, this has always been part of my identity, it's very visible. And then talking about the strategy of the military litigation and the impact that has, it seems to me that you have probably a really unique perspective on what is to come. There have been surprises along the way, of course, you couldn't have predicted the political changes, or the effect of the work you took on earlier and even thinking that it was going to have a certain path and it actually had this other impact. But I'm curious, what is something that you believe, that you feel like, because of your unique vantage point, because of the unique vantage point you have on society as a turban-wearing Sikh, or all these other related identities you have, what is something that you think you see that other people can't see yet about how something's going to be different here in this country, this society, in the next five years?

Amandeep Sidhu: So you're going to ask me a question. A lot to unpack there, my friend, that's a good question. So, I think there were very few people in the Sikh community that were in big law, very few guideposts on what that was going to look like, whether I would still be in this environment 16 years later. A couple of years into it I knew it was something I really wanted to do, because I felt like I needed to do it, because I felt like I was on track to do it, I felt like it was in my reach to make partner, and I knew that nobody had done that before. So when I made partner in 2013, I was the first turban-wearing Sikh partner in U.S. history at an Am Law 100 firm. That had never happened before. And I helped mentor someone who was considering lateraling, and he moved over, and he moved over and made partner a couple of years after me, and then he made equity partner a few years ago. His name is Nick, and Nick then became the first equity partner at an Am Law 100 firm when he got promoted to equity. And when I made my move to Winston & Strawn, I became the second turban-wearing equity partner. And so you've got Dentons and Winston basically on the map for the only two turban-wearing equity partners in the country right now. And that's not the end, right? That can't be the end. And so I think about all the people that I mentor now, and that Nick mentors, and the folks that have come behind us that we've mentored, and now they are mentoring.

We are at this incredible inflection point where our communities are gaining influence and power and recognition at a significant, fast clip. I mentioned Gurbir Grewal as one of my early mentors. His elevation, first as the Bergen County prosecutor, which was historic, next as the Attorney General of New Jersey, was absolutely historic, and the impact that he had in that leadership role is going to reverberate for generations. And Ravi as the first Sikh mayor in the country, as the mayor of Hoboken, that breaks the barrier for someone else to think they can do that. And so what's next, I think, is lots of people doing the same thing, right, leadership in law firms, leadership in government service, elected office. You think about the wave of diverse female candidates that won in 2017, and Ilhan Omar leading the charge for religious head coverings in Congress, that's a powerful moment to see happen and to see what comes behind it.

I also think what has allowed me to accomplish what I have in my career has not just been my own community, right. If I had relied totally on this community, or even the South Asian community, I have very few mentors or sponsors or peers along the way. So the people who lifted me up have been Black partners, white partners, and everything in between, who have helped me. Broader AAPI partners who helped me get to partner, helped me when I was making this decision to move. I left with a group, and it was no accident, I left with two Black partners and myself.

And so that is also part of this future, recognizing that we're all kind of in this together. And it's not to the exclusion or the knocking of the non-diverse folks in this world. It's recognizing that we might all do this together, and that we share our experiences, people's eyes are open to what we might be going through, there's just a little bit of a glimmer to say, okay, I'm going to use my privilege to help lift up folks that should be at the same level as me when it comes to leadership or opportunity. And I will say, it is very gratifying to be at Winston at a time when that is front and center of leadership's priorities. It's not just, how do we grow as a law firm for the next 150 years, it is, how do we grow as a diverse law firm for the next 150 years, how do we ensure that diversity is not just lip service, who's in leadership, who's running this firm in five years, in 10 years, in 20 years, in 30 years?

I think that shared shift across communities of color, and then back to the majority, is incredibly important.

Khurram Naik: So someone reached out to me recently and asked me for comment on advice for people at big law firms. I was at two big law firms. And I said, yeah, I don't know how interesting the things I have to say are, because I think so many things that diverse lawyers run into are just things that are inherent to big law firms, and so much of what happens at large law firms is just a product of the economics, that they bill by the hour. So there's a lot you can't change head-on. But my takeaway was, it's not necessarily the case that someone needs to change big law. You talked about some of the ways in which large law firms, Winston specifically, are changing, and there are only so many stakeholders like yourself who are in a position to make those changes. But there's plenty of other ways to create change. And so, something that you did to create change 20 years ago with the launch of the Sikh Coalition, that's something that you didn't need anybody's permission to do, or any law firm's buy-in to do. And so the message I had at first was going to be, hey, you don't have to make a large law firm conform to you, you can find your own path, and that doesn't have to be at a large law firm. And then another component was, I think it's really important to find your people, whoever those people are, and there are different forms of those people, it can be around a substantive area that you find really interesting, it could be an affinity group that's kind of specific, like a South Asian bar association, or something broader. I was part of, for four years, the associate board in Chicago of the Chicago Committee, which is for diverse lawyers at large law firms, focused on elevation to partnership. So "find your people" was, at first I thought that was my message, but today, as I reflected on it, I actually think my message is to build your own community. So that's the point behind Panic Cooler. I mentioned Panic before, and right now it's just a newsletter. But I think there's so much more that it can be. There are about 1,300 members in it right now that are South Asian lawyers, and right now, very simple core premise, we talked about this idea of the pyramid thing, where you start with something, and that's the wedge. And so right now for Panic Cooler, my focus, you talked about some of the social impact you're generating, which I think is incredible, and so something with Panic Cooler, there's an economic impact, primarily just making sure people are getting to good jobs and staying in those places and connecting with South Asian lawyers. So that's my pet project, and that's something that I've found meaningful to me, and it generates a kind of impact that I want to see for this community that I care about. But I'm curious to hear from you. I think there's, we need more entrepreneurs like yourself that are doing these kinds of things. And so that's something I want to talk more about, and I'm very interested in getting your take. For people that are lawyers, South Asian lawyers, that have this drive to entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, however you want to put it, and they want to succeed, and they're not sure how to think about it, where to start, or they want some inspiration, what are the things you would say to someone in that position? Maybe you even guide people like that, but can you share here, what are the things you would say to somebody who wants to create an impact?

Amandeep Sidhu: So I think that's a great thing to do, grow themselves, grow their community.

Khurram Naik: Tell me about that.

Amandeep Sidhu: Yeah, absolutely, and it's good timing, because I served as Winston's partner chair of our summer program this past few months in D.C. I was interested in the summer associates' time and what it means to jump into a law firm out of law school. And I say this as someone who didn't know, again, didn't think in law school I'd end up in big law, didn't think when I joined big law I'd still be in big law, you know, a decade and a half later. So I can't imagine anything else, because I've been able to have such a rewarding experience with two different law firms.

And the advice that I have learned over time, so I say this knowing that I did not follow it early enough in my career. I'd been in my career for three years when I joined McDermott, and my wife and I had twin daughters, so that sent life into a complete tailspin in terms of schedule and priorities. But as a general rule, what I've realized at this point in my career and in my life is this: if you aim for 20 and get 10, or even get 5, doing stuff that's just for you really allows you to stay healthy and in a good mental space to be able to tackle and manage that other 80%. And it doesn't mean that the 20% can't be sitting with your partner or with your family, but it's got to be something you're really thinking about.

I think it's the same idea, and I'll offer, and this is the advice I've given to many associates, that if you derive your professional happiness from the four corners of your 2,000 billable hours and the client-facing work that you're doing, even if you love it and love the work and love the subject matter and love the industry you're focused on, that's not going to be as rewarding as if you find a way to do that and also find your other passion. And so for some people it's teaching and being an adjunct professor at the local law school, for some people it's pro bono, for some people it's being on the DEI circuit and speaking at conferences and focusing on that work, for some it's developing something like Panic Cooler and having this incredible community and platform that's providing resources and opportunities to share across the community.

If you don't have that other piece that's tied to your professional life, you might get burned out. And so I think the way that I have not, I mean, not just that I haven't had moments of feeling burnt out, but the way I haven't completely lost it and the fact that I've stayed with it for as long as I have, for me, it's a little bit of each of those, right? So I get invited to teach a lecture every year or so, and that's fine, but that's not my bucket. My bucket is pro bono, it's DEI, and I love to speak at conferences.

I love to be focused on that. I love serving on the diversity and inclusion committee at Winston. But pro bono has been my way of giving back to my community, of leveraging the resources of my law firms, feeling like I'm doing something really meaningful. And I think you've got to find what that is.

And if you have that thing you're passionate about, whether it's in any of those buckets I just described or some other area that I haven't thought of, maybe it's art, maybe it's stand-up, I just interviewed a summer associate who was a stand-up comedian before he came to law school. And I was like, don't lose that, man. Keep doing that. There's no reason you can't be a stand-up comic on the side and have that kind of fun, because that's an outlet that will keep you grounded.

And so I think you have to do that. So it's the 80-20 rule. It's got to be something else that you're balancing out with what is very intense, hours-driven, revenue-driven, like all of that stuff, that's what allows a law firm to be successful. If you're not thinking about that as an associate, you're going to fail. You're going to fail. But I'm going to say that you can do that in a way that accounts for your own mental health and sanity by finding that other piece of what you want to focus on.

Khurram Naik: Good. Final thoughts? Is that my final thought, or any final thoughts? Well, I think that could be a good one. If you have a final thought, I'll hear it.

Amandeep Sidhu: No, this has been great, man. I mean, the one thing that I think we need to do more of in the South Asian legal community is lifting each other up, right? Like, I saw what I thought was a gap in the South Asian bar in D.C. on partners helping partners, and in-house lawyers giving opportunities to South Asian lawyers at firms. And so I complained enough to my friends that were on the South Asian bar board in D.C. that they finally were like, stop complaining, just run for the board. So I did, two years ago, and I'm probably a decade older than everybody else on the board.

But I was like, you know what, I'll put my body where my mouth is. I'll serve on the board for a couple of years. And we launched, a few months ago, Partner Circle. So it's bringing together, what are there, 80 South Asian partners in D.C.? And it's a number that's way bigger than I thought. I liked my little network of 10 or 15 people that were on my radar, I thought that was still a significant number, but it's much larger than that.

And so you think about the referral opportunities, the opportunities to potentially pitch together to clients, you add to that the possibility of having South Asian lawyers in leadership positions in-house willing to give other South Asian lawyers those opportunities. That's the way we're going to blow things up, right? And we don't have to look very far to other minority communities to see how they have used that type of connectivity to run the game. And so I think we have so much promise, so much potential. And I think what you're doing with Panic Cooler, sharing new stories and providing a platform to communicate together, is just a really, really great initiative.

Khurram Naik: Thanks, man. And yeah, I mean, my logic is it's just asymmetric payoff, because, like you say, we've already as a community accomplished so much. And even just thinking about the headlines that involve South Asian lawyers in the past year, I mean, you've got people like, take your pick of which Grewal you want to talk about, or Lina Khan, and this is just what it looks like to just get started. Just for you to be the second turban-wearing Sikh, you know, that's just getting started. Like you say, this isn't the cap, right? This is just getting started. So to me, it's just prudent, why wouldn't you want to invest in this community, because there's just so much upside? So I'm excited to see what comes in the coming years and to keep on building here.

Amandeep Sidhu: I am too, man.

Khurram Naik: All right, man, well, hey, great catching up.

Amandeep Sidhu: Thanks so much. I'm glad we were able to do this.