Quick Answer
- Employment discrimination cases run on statutory EEOC deadlines. A generic pipeline built for sales leads will miss them.
- The 180-day or 300-day charge-filing window and the 90-day right-to-sue window are the two hard dates every pipeline stage must anchor to.
- Five stages cover the discrimination case lifecycle: Lead Received, Charge Filed, Investigation or Mediation Active, Right-to-Sue Received, and Litigation Decision.
- Automated alerts at the 60-day and 30-day marks before each deadline are the minimum viable setup.
- Protected-class tags on each record support intake reporting and ad attribution. They should describe claim type, not the claimant personally.
- Signed-retainer events sent from the CRM back to Meta and Google via the Conversions API close the attribution loop so the platforms bid toward signed cases.
Why Discrimination Cases Need Deadline-Driven Stages, Not Generic Ones
Employment discrimination cases operate on EEOC statutory deadlines that a generic sales CRM was never designed to track.
Employment discrimination cases operate on EEOC statutory deadlines that a generic sales CRM was never designed to track.
Most CRM pipelines borrowed from sales funnels move by buyer behavior: opened email, booked a call, received a proposal. That logic breaks down completely in a discrimination case. The case does not move because someone replied to a follow-up sequence. It moves because a government agency issued a document, and that document started a countdown the firm cannot stop.
The EEOC charge filing process has its own lifecycle with defined milestones: charge filed, notice served on the respondent employer, investigation open, mediation offered, cause determination or no-cause finding, and right-to-sue letter issued. Each milestone is legally significant. Missing the window that follows one of them can extinguish the claim entirely.
A pipeline that reflects that lifecycle is not a nice operational upgrade. It is the infrastructure that keeps a discrimination case practice from losing cases to calendar failures.
Stage 1: Charge Filed vs Charge Pending Tracking
The first legal deadline a discrimination case firm must manage is the charge-filing deadline itself.
Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the ADA, and the ADEA, a person generally has 180 days from the date of the discriminatory act to file a charge with the EEOC. In states and localities that have their own fair employment practices agency with authority equivalent to the EEOC, that deadline extends to 300 days. The EEOC refers to these as "deferral states." The practical split is significant: most of the country is a deferral state, so most charges carry the 300-day window, but the 180-day deadline still applies in states without a qualifying agency.
Source: EEOC, "Filing a Charge of Discrimination".
A CRM pipeline for a discrimination case firm must therefore distinguish between two different pre-charge statuses:
Lead Received. The prospective client has contacted the firm. No charge has been filed. The clock may already be running. The intake record must capture the date of the alleged discriminatory act, not just the date of first contact. Those two dates are often weeks or months apart, and the gap determines how much time is left.
Charge Pending. The firm has agreed to represent the client in the EEOC process, the charge has been filed, and the EEOC has issued a charge number. The pipeline record moves here and the EEOC's investigation period begins. Under the EEOC's current processing procedures, the agency is required to notify the employer (the respondent) within ten days of receiving the charge.
The intake form that feeds the CRM must ask for the date of the last discriminatory act, not just a description of what happened. Without that date, the pipeline cannot calculate remaining time, and no automation can fire the right alerts.
Stage 2: Right-to-Sue Letter Receipt as an Automated Trigger
The right-to-sue letter starts a strict 90-day window to file a federal lawsuit under Title VII, the ADA, and the ADEA.
The right-to-sue letter is the most consequential document in the discrimination case pipeline. When the EEOC issues one, whether after a no-cause finding, after a cause determination where conciliation failed, or at the claimant's own request after 180 days have elapsed in the investigation, it starts a strict 90-day window to file a federal lawsuit.
That 90-day deadline is statutory under 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-5(f)(1) for Title VII claims, and courts have consistently treated it as a mandatory deadline. Missing it generally bars the federal claim entirely. Source: EEOC, "Right to Sue".
A CRM stage tied to the right-to-sue receipt date, with an automated 60-day and 30-day alert, is the minimum viable setup for a discrimination case pipeline.
The pipeline stage for this milestone must do three things automatically when a right-to-sue letter is logged:
- Record the receipt date as a CRM field, not a note. A note buried in the activity log does not trigger automations. A dedicated date field does.
- Calculate the 90-day deadline and populate a "lawsuit deadline" field on the record.
- Fire alert sequences to the responsible attorney and their paralegal at 60 days remaining and again at 30 days remaining.
Most CRMs that support custom fields and date-based workflows can execute this. The setup requires a date field for right-to-sue receipt, a formula or calculated field for the deadline, and two time-based automations keyed to that calculated date. If the CRM does not support calculated date fields natively, a lightweight automation layer can handle the arithmetic.
The EEOC's process for requesting a right-to-sue letter before 180 days has elapsed also requires tracking. If a client requests early issuance, the pipeline must flag that the investigation is not complete and that the right-to-sue was requested, not issued after a determination. That distinction matters for how the firm frames the litigation decision.
Stage 3: Litigation Decision Stage and Documentation Needs
Once the right-to-sue letter is in hand and the 90-day clock is running, the firm reaches the most consequential internal decision point: file a federal lawsuit, pursue state-court claims where available, resolve through demand, or decline to proceed.
This is a distinct pipeline stage, and it should be tracked as one.
Why it needs its own stage: the litigation decision stage is where case economics get evaluated. The file at this point should contain the EEOC charge, the employer's position statement if one was obtained, the EEOC's determination letter, the right-to-sue letter, any documentary evidence gathered during investigation, and the firm's internal case assessment. If the record is incomplete, the firm is making a litigation decision on partial information.
The CRM stage for litigation decision should include a checklist of required documents before the stage can close. Some CRMs support "required fields before stage advance" logic. If the firm's CRM does not, the checklist can live as a task template that fires when the record enters this stage.
Documentation tags to build in:
- EEOC charge number (text field, referenced in every filing)
- Right-to-sue date received (date field, feeds the 90-day automation)
- Determination type (dropdown: cause, no-cause, administrative closure, withdrawn, right-to-sue requested)
- State agency charge filed (yes/no, relevant for deferral state claims)
- Litigation decision (dropdown: federal complaint filed, state claim filed, demand letter sent, declined)
A record that exits this stage without a litigation decision logged is an open liability. The automation should flag any record that has been in litigation decision for more than 14 days with no decision logged.
Building Deadline Alerts So No Charge Window Gets Missed
The EEOC charge filing deadline is 180 days in states without a fair employment practices agency, and 300 days in states that have one.
The alert architecture for a discrimination case pipeline covers two separate deadline types: the pre-charge filing deadline and the post-right-to-sue filing deadline. They require different triggers and different recipients.
Pre-charge filing alerts fire from the date of the alleged discriminatory act, which must be captured at intake. If the firm is advising a potential client who has not yet filed a charge, the pipeline should flag when 120 days have passed without a charge filed (in a 180-day state) or when 240 days have passed (in a 300-day state). These alerts give the firm and the client time to file before the window closes.
Post-right-to-sue alerts fire from the right-to-sue receipt date. The 90-day window is the critical one. Alerts at 60 days and 30 days remaining are the floor. Some firms add a 14-day alert for any record where no court filing has been confirmed.
Alert routing matters as much as timing. An alert that goes only to an intake coordinator who cannot file a complaint does not protect the client or the firm. Each alert should route to the attorney of record and their backup, not just a shared inbox.
CRM automations that support this architecture:
Most enterprise-grade CRMs used in law firms (Salesforce, Clio Grow, HubSpot with legal configurations, Lawmatics) support time-based workflows triggered by date fields. The setup is:
- Trigger: date field updated (right-to-sue receipt date)
- Condition: 90-day deadline field populated
- Actions: task created for attorney of record at 60 days, task created at 30 days, email alert to attorney and paralegal at each interval
For firms that handle volume and want alerts to escalate if unacknowledged, an AI-powered lead response layer can monitor task completion and re-route an unacknowledged alert to a supervising partner. See how RGDM builds that layer at /services/ai-automation/ai-lead-response.
Tagging by Protected Class for Reporting Without Creating Liability
Tagging records by protected class lets a firm report on its intake mix and attribution without creating a document that volunteers legal admissions.
A discrimination case practice handles claims across multiple protected classes under Title VII (race, color, religion, sex, national origin), the ADA (disability), the ADEA (age, 40 and older), the Equal Pay Act, and state equivalents. Without structured tagging, the firm cannot report on which claim types its advertising is producing, which ones are converting to signed retainers, and which ones are reaching litigation.
The tagging structure should label the claim type alleged, not the claimant's personal characteristics. The CRM field is "claim type" with values like "race discrimination," "sex discrimination," "disability discrimination," "age discrimination," and "retaliation." It is not a field that records the claimant's race, sex, disability status, or age as personal data. The distinction matters both for reporting utility and for avoiding a document that volunteers information the firm does not need to store.
With claim-type tags in place, the pipeline can report:
- Which ad campaigns are producing discrimination inquiries by claim type
- Which claim types are converting from inquiry to signed retainer at the highest rate
- Which claim types are reaching right-to-sue and proceeding to litigation
That last report is the one that connects marketing to signed cases. When the firm knows that retaliation claims sign at a meaningfully higher rate than constructive discharge claims from the same ad campaign, it can refine both the ad creative and the intake qualifying questions.
The qualifying landing page for a discrimination case campaign should ask the claim-type question before a lead ever reaches the intake team. Example: a qualifying page for an employment discrimination firm might ask "What type of discrimination are you reporting?" with options by protected class. That answer flows into the CRM record as a tag at the moment the form submits, not after a manual intake call.
For how that qualifying page connects to the ad campaign and the CRM record, see /services/paid-media/landing-pages-cro.
Closing the Attribution Loop: Signed Cases Back to the Ad Platform
A discrimination case pipeline that stops at intake tracking is half-built.
The signed retainer is the outcome the ad platform needs to see. When Meta or Google receives only form-fill events, it optimizes toward people who fill out forms. When it receives signed-retainer events, it optimizes toward people who sign retainers. Those are not the same population, and for a practice area like employment discrimination, where the qualifying bar is higher than a simple car accident inquiry, the difference in lead quality is material.
Sending signed-case events back to the ad platform closes the loop so Meta and Google optimize toward cases, not form fills.
The technical path is straightforward. When a CRM record moves into the "Signed Retainer" stage, a webhook fires to Meta's Conversions API and Google's offline conversion import, passing the click ID that was captured when the lead first arrived. That click ID ties the signed case back to the specific ad, audience, and creative that produced it.
This is the same mechanism that works for any contingency-fee practice area, applied here to a case type with a longer lead-to-sign cycle. Discrimination cases often take weeks between first contact and signed retainer, because the EEOC process itself may still be in early stages. The offline conversion import handles that latency. Meta and Google both support delayed conversion events well past the initial click window, provided the click ID was captured at the moment of first form submission.
For the full tracking architecture from click to signed case, see /services/tracking-automation/conversion-tracking.
For how the CRM automation layer connects these pipeline stages to the ad platforms, see /services/tracking-automation/crm-automation.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you track EEOC filing deadlines in a CRM?
Capture the date of the alleged discriminatory act as a dedicated date field at intake, not as a note. Use a calculated or formula field to populate the charge-filing deadline, which is 180 days from that date in states without a qualifying fair employment practices agency, or 300 days in deferral states. Set time-based workflow automations to alert the attorney of record and their backup at defined intervals before that deadline. The automation trigger is the date field, not a manual calendar entry.
What pipeline stages fit a discrimination case?
Five stages cover the EEOC lifecycle for a discrimination case: Lead Received (alleged act date captured, pre-charge), Charge Filed (EEOC charge number assigned, investigation open), Investigation or Mediation Active (EEOC process ongoing), Right-to-Sue Received (90-day federal filing window begins), and Litigation Decision (federal complaint filed, state claim filed, demand sent, or case declined). Generic stages like "Prospect" or "Proposal" do not map to these milestones and produce gaps in deadline tracking.
What automations help with right-to-sue tracking?
Three automations are required. First, a trigger on the right-to-sue receipt date field that calculates and populates the 90-day lawsuit deadline. Second, a task and email alert to the attorney of record at 60 days remaining. Third, a second task and email alert at 30 days remaining. An optional fourth automation flags any record that has been in the right-to-sue stage for more than 14 days without a court filing logged. All four can be built in any CRM that supports date-field-triggered workflows.
Can a CRM tag cases by protected class without creating compliance problems?
Yes, with the right field structure. Tag the claim type alleged (race discrimination, sex discrimination, disability discrimination, age discrimination, retaliation) rather than the claimant's personal characteristics. The field describes what the case is about, not who the client is. That distinction keeps the tagging useful for intake reporting and ad attribution while avoiding a database of sensitive personal attributes the firm does not need to store.
How long does the EEOC investigation typically take?
The EEOC does not publish a binding investigation timeline, and actual processing times vary. The agency's annual performance data, published in its Performance and Accountability Reports, shows median charge processing times that have varied over years and differ by field office. The pipeline should not rely on an assumed investigation duration. Instead, it should track the actual date any determination or right-to-sue letter is received and trigger automations from that date.
Does the 90-day right-to-sue window apply to state claims too?
No. The 90-day window is specific to federal claims under Title VII, the ADA, and the ADEA following an EEOC right-to-sue letter. State fair employment practice statutes set their own filing deadlines, which vary by state. Many states have longer windows for state-law claims. The pipeline should include a state claim deadline field for each record where a parallel state agency charge was filed, and that field should be populated separately from the federal right-to-sue deadline.
How does a discrimination case CRM connect to ad campaign tracking?
Each lead that arrives from a Meta or Google ad carries a click ID, captured by the tracking pixel or by URL parameter at the moment the form submits. That click ID is stored on the CRM record. When the record moves to the signed-retainer stage, the CRM automation sends the click ID back to the ad platform as an offline conversion event via Meta's Conversions API or Google's offline conversion import. The ad platform then attributes the signed case to the specific ad and audience that produced it, and uses that signal to find more people who match that profile.
What intake question is most important for a discrimination case pipeline?
The date of the last discriminatory act. That date determines how much time is left before the EEOC charge-filing deadline expires. Without it, the pipeline cannot calculate the remaining window, and no deadline automation can fire accurately. The qualifying page and the intake call both need to capture this date before any other case evaluation begins.
A discrimination case practice has more hard deadlines per file than almost any other employment law category. The EEOC process creates multiple statutory windows, and a pipeline that does not track them structurally will eventually miss one.
If you want to see how RGDM builds the full case acquisition system for employment law firms, from the Meta ad through intake, the CRM pipeline, and the signed-case signal back to the platform, start with a free Case Acquisition Review at /contact.