© 2014 The Texas Lawbook.
By Mark Curriden – GRAPEVINE – (October 21) – Don Liu shook his head in near disbelief as he stared into the vastness that is the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center.
“This place is huge; it is Texas-sized,” Xerox’s general counsel and executive vice president said in amazement. “Entire towns could fit under this dome. Very impressive.”
“There is no excuse. None,” he stated with emphasis.
Liu learned that the Dallas Bar Diversity Task Force had just issued its annual report card grading DFW law firms. Not a single law firm passed. None even came close.
Worse, according to Liu, is that some Dallas law firms refused to participate in the survey.
“The demographics of Dallas and Texas make it hard for any law firm to justify these results,” he said.
Texas law firms better pay attention to Liu. His corporate legal department hires dozens of Texas lawyers annually for litigation, regulatory and transactional matters. He requires law firms to report diversity numbers to his team to see how serious the firms are about diversity.
Last year, Liu fired a law firm that was getting $1 million a year in business from Xerox.
“This particular law firm didn’t even respond to our diversity inquiry,” he said. “We warned this law firm and they just blew us off.
“So, we have blown them off,” he said.
Clay Scheitzach, Xerox’s deputy general counsel in Dallas, said his boss is adamant about diversity for two reasons: it is the right thing to do and it is smart business.
“Texas law firms need to do a lot more – the diversity report made that clear,” he said. “These numbers clearly show that Texas law firms are not doing enough.
“One of Don’s greatest attributes is that he is a man of action,” Scheitzach said. “Don understands that a lot of law firms talk about being committed to diversity but their actions don’t back it up. If law firms want to continue working with us, they need to address this.”
Liu, who joined New Jersey-based Xerox in 2007, is back in Dallas this week as the keynote speaker at this Thursday’s Dallas Asian-American Bar Association’s annual dinner and award’s event.
“Don is a true leader and an excellent lawyer,” said Wilson Chu, a corporate M&A partner at K&L Gates in Dallas who has worked for Xerox. “Don has been a leading voice for diversity, but he does a lot more than talk. He lives diversity.”
Liu said that diversity – or the lack of diversity – is not an easy problem to solve.
“Diversity can be a genuinely tricky problem,” he said. “Very few law firms are guilty of outright racism. Some are, but not many.”
Liu said many law firms established diversity committees 15 years ago with the purpose of achieving better diversity statistics. Those, he said, were destined to fail.
“Early versions of diversity programs stated that they wanted to treat everyone equally or the same,” he said. “That was a very naïve starting point because every ethnic group has its own issues. African-Americans face different biases than Asians or Latinos. And women face other unique challenges.”
The better starting point, he said, is to “overcome implicit bias.”
Liu said Asian-American lawyers are stereotyped as being nerdy and great at brief writing or transactional work. As a result, he said, they are discouraged from trial work.
“Diversity committees, when they work best, help lawyers understand and identify implicit bias that we all have because of our upbringing, our education and our environments,” he said.
Liu said that he is sensitive to charges that general counsel should not micro-manage the law firms they hire, but he said that certain standards are not onerous.
Law firms must have a diversity committee to seriously address issues and the head of the committee should be an equity partner who has a seat on the management committee, he said.
Liu said that diversity for him started in his own legal department of more than 150 lawyers.
“Recruiters said it was hard to find qualified diverse candidates,” he said. “If you are serious, you really have to push for it. I told the recruiter that I would go somewhere else. You have to insist upon diversity.”
Diversity “brings true debate, new ideas,” Liu told the Minority Trial Lawyer magazine last year. “No stone is left unturned when people have different perspectives. Without diversity, the whole group could fall off a cliff and not realize it.”
“Numbers don’t always tell the whole story, but they are very important,” he said. “If a law firm has been recruiting minority lawyers for 20 years and there are still no ethnic minority or women partners, then that law firm is not serious about diversity.
“Some law firms are good at checking boxes, but results matter,” Liu said. “At the end of the day, money talks and statistics matter.”
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