© 2013 The Texas Lawbook.
By Mark Curriden, JD
Senior Writer for The Texas Lawbook
(October 14) – The largest law firms in Dallas get their report card for diversity this week.
They are all getting an F.
The Dallas Diversity Task Force’s 2013 report shows that not only is diversity not improving at the city’s biggest law firms, it is getting worse.
None of the 19 largest firms meet even minimum standards for recruiting, hiring, promoting and retaining minority lawyers, according to the study, which is conducted annually by the African American, Hispanic and Asian bar associations of Dallas.
“Clearly, the results are not good,” says Rosa Orenstein, a partner at Sullivan & Holsten and chair of the task force. “I know the wheels of justice turn slow, but diversity in Dallas is improving at a glacial pace. In fact, the situation has become regressive.
“We have to try to figure out what is going on and how to fix it,” says Orenstein.
The Diversity Task Force report has some astounding statistics, including:
• One percent of the 799 equity partners at the largest law firms in Dallas are African-American;
• Thirteen of the 19 law firms have no African-American partners and five of the firms have only one;
• Only 2.5 percent of partners are Hispanic;
• Eight of the large firms have no Latino partners and five have only one; and
• The attrition rate among minority partners is more than double the rate of white partners.
While two-thirds of Dallas County’s population is non-white, less than 12 percent of all lawyers at the 19 big firms are minorities.
Even when law firms succeed at hiring more minority leaders, they have a pathetic retention rate. The report shows that African-American and Hispanic senior associates and partners leave the big law firms at more than twice the rate of their white counterparts.
The statistics have many law firm leaders scratching their heads.
“Many of us felt 15 years or so ago that we were on a real trajectory toward improvement, but these numbers are very depressing,” says Rob Walters, managing partner of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Dallas.
“At the end of the day, lawyers stay at their law firm because they are successful there, but minorities are leaving because they don’t feel they are experiencing that success,” says Walters. “That’s where law firms need to focus.”
Most big law firms appear to be making basic efforts to improve diversity but those efforts are not leading to significant results, according to the study’s authors.
The report found that 95 percent of the law firms participated in minority job fairs, but that only 26 percent of them hired someone from the fair – a decline from 46 percent just one year ago. Two-thirds of the law firms recruited at law schools where minorities make a majority of the student body, but only one in six firms hired a student at one of those schools.
“The numbers are bad and not what they should be, but there is no ill will or bad intent by the leaders of these law firms,” says Clarence Brown, an associate general counsel at Contran Corporation and Valhi Inc.
Brown, who is president of the Dallas chapter of the General Counsel Forum, says there are many contributing factors behind the diversity problems, including a slow economy, a smaller pipeline of talented young minorities going to law school and increased competition for minority lawyers by corporate legal departments and small litigation boutiques.
“In addition, law firms are inherently bad managers of people,” says Brown. “By the time most law firms realize their young talented minority lawyers are frustrated and looking to leave, it is too late. Others have snatched them up.”
Brown says some of the blame rests with minority lawyers at corporate legal departments who should be doing more to nurture relationships and growth with young African-American and Hispanic lawyers who work for their outside law firms.
“In-house lawyers can be far more potent in helping fix this problem than even law firm managing partners,” says Walters, who is the former general counsel at Energy Future Holdings.
“General counsels need to get granular by demanding diversity on the outside legal teams working on their projects and they need to make minority partners team leaders and the client’s primary contact, because that’s where the influence and power lies at big law firms,” he says. “Clients can absolutely insist on this and that would go a long way.”
Several corporate legal departments, including AT&T, Verizon and Exxon Mobil, require their outside law firms to have a diverse group of lawyers handling their legal matters.
Hope Shimabuku, a former assistant general counsel at Blackberry in Texas and a member of the Diversity Task Force, agrees that general counsels could have an “enormous influence” on the diversity problem.
“If there is recognition within a company that diversity is an issue from the highest levels, then that value is pushed out even to the level of hiring diverse counsel,” she says. “This push doesn’t necessarily even need to originate internally but can flow from the supply chain as well.”
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