Recently, progress has been made in helping courts to understand the concept of unconscious bias and consider it in their decision-making.  Plaintiffs’ firms and legal services organizations alike have found proving discrimination cases to be extremely difficult.  Often courts want to see a “smoking gun”; a memo, email, conversation, or other direct evidence that the defendant intentionally discriminated before they will side with a plaintiff.   However, Professor William T. Bielby from the University of Pennsylvania  has been working to help courts understand that such a smoking gun often doesn’t exist and isn’t strictly necessary.  His testimony and expert opinions have been key in helping to advance many large class action cases on behalf of women and minorities against some of the country’s biggest corporations,  including Wal-Mart.  In the employment setting, Professor Bielby cites too much management discretion as the biggest problem, saying that “the tendency to invoke gender stereotypes in making judgments about people is rapid and automatic,” and “as a result, people are often unaware of how stereotypes affect their perceptions and behavior,” including “individuals whose personal beliefs are relatively free of prejudice.”  In the case of Wal-Mart, Bielby found fault with how management candidates were identified.  Without a “systematic mechanism” for identifying candidates he believes managers often assumed that women would not want to relocate and thus would not identify them as candidates for management positions that would require a move.  Professor Bielby’s work in this area is essential to helping the courts and the legal system start to understand and address the unconscious and implicit biases that influence decision making.  Legal services organizations and advocates can look to his work and to the courts which are accepting these  arguments to help improve our own advocacy efforts in these areas.