Breaking Barriers to Justice
conflict, and trust through their own experiences. A lawyer who misunderstands a client’s cultural framework may misunderstand the client’s goals, fears, priorities, or credibility, missing important case value and context. Language is a tool, but it alone does not yield understanding. True access to justice requires cultural competence, which in turn requires cultural humility. Cultural competence means understanding and adapting to different cultural backgrounds, expectations, and norms. Cultural humility recognizes something deeper: no lawyer can become an expert in every culture. Instead, lawyers must commit to lifelong self-reflection, curiosity, and awareness of their own assumptions and biases.
and lawyers cannot effectively represent clients they do not fully understand.
The Problem No One Wants to Say Out Loud
There are lawyers who advertise in Spanish and then fail Spanish-speaking clients in Spanish. They may have good intentions. They may believe they are providing accessibility. But sometimes language becomes the marketing hook rather than the foundation of meaningful representation. A lawyer may misunderstand a client’s behavior shaped by trauma. They may mistake silence for agreement, deference for lack of credibility, or minimizing pain for lack of damages. They may develop a legal strategy that conflicts with the client’s actual goals because they never truly understood the client’s world. For example, a lawyer may interpret a client avoiding eye contact as dishonesty, when in another culture looking down may communicate respect. A client may repeatedly say “I’m fine” not because they are uninjured, but because they are accustomed to enduring hardship without complaint. A client may avoid discussing money because asking for compensation feels uncomfortable or morally inappropriate. The result is a justice gap created not by language, but by misunderstanding.
A New Concept for the Legal Profession
Cultural competence and cultural humility are relatively new concepts in the legal profession. The profession has only recently begun formally addressing implicit bias and cross-cultural competency. The State Bar of California incorporated implicit bias education and bias-reducing strategies into MCLE requirements in 2024. Nationally, the American Bar Association moved in a similar direction when it mandated education on bias, cross- cultural competency, and racism in law schools in 2021, with implementation beginning in 2023. This means many attorneys practicing today received little or no formal education on cultural competence or cultural humility during law school or bar preparation. Just as lawyers must continually adapt to changing technology and artificial intelligence, cultural competence is becoming a necessary skill for modern advocacy. California’s demographics are changing,
Why Cultural Humility Is So Difficult
The challenge is that lawyers are trained to believe in objectivity. In his memoir One L , Scott Turow described law school as a process of “unlearning how to feel” in order to succeed in a profession that values logic and analysis. Yet, decades of research in psychology, medicine, and legal scholarship show that human decision-making is never completely neutral. Everyone has biases, whether explicit or
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Consumer Attorneys of California
FORUM July/August 2026
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