A Report from the Chair
I decided to devote this final column to affirmative action. Last year, I attended a conference in Washington, D. C., hosted by the U.S. Attorney General to discuss racial and ethnic diversity in the legal profession. At one of the breakout sessions, a young African American lawyer stood to talk about her experience at a prominent Boston law firm. Her poignant comments are instructive about why, despite all of the talk, too little progress has been made to improve the diversity of our profession, especially among top law firms.
The young lawyer explained that despite the fact that partners in her firm frequently invited her to attend functions to promote affirmative action, she felt the firm was not doing all it could to advance her career. One day she attended a meeting with a client on whose behalf she had done a lot of work, along with a young white female associate who was junior to her; the partner whom she had expected to attend the meeting did not appear. She painfully recounted her surprise and hurt when her junior colleague began to run the meeting.
When the meeting was over, the lawyer asked her junior colleague what had happened? Where was the partner? How had the junior associate gotten up to speed to run the meeting? The junior associate responded that something had come up the day before that prevented the partner from attending the meeting. He had called the junior associate into his office and, along with another partner, had briefed her on the substance of the meeting, and asked her to run it in his absence.
The young African American lawyer asked those of us at the session how she should interpret what had happened. Why hadn't she, as the more senior lawyer, been given the opportunity to run the meeting? Until that day, she thought the partner who ran the case thought highly of her work. And why hadn't the partner bothered to let her know what was happening prior to the meeting? I thought it took a lot of courage for the woman to tell such a personal story to strangers; and I told her so.
There could be a thousand explanations for what happened to this lawyer. Perhaps the partner was insensitive; maybe the junior associate was more talented; or perhaps race was involved. How would you have interpreted the story? What advice would you have given to the woman? And what, if anything, does this anecdote have to do with diversity?
Let me try to answer the last question. In my experience as a lawyer, I had the most extraordinary good fortune to work with two senior partners of prominent law firms who mentored me by accepting personal responsibility for my development as a lawyer. I never felt that either of them saw me as an ornament. Each gently held the controls as I learned, and eventually let me fly solo.
In 1975, I started my first law firm job as an associate at the New York firm of Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Handler, where I worked for nearly a year with Fred Livingston, who headed the firm's labor department. The firm, at the time, was representing a New York police union in its challenge to the application of an emergency New York wage freeze to an arbitral award that the union had won and that a court subsequently had confirmed. When I arrived at the firm, Fred asked me to work on the case.
Although my principal contribution to the case was to research and write legal memoranda, Fred always made me feel like I was an integral part of the legal team representing the client. When he argued the case, I sat next to him at counsel table. Everything that Fred did conveyed the message that I was a Kaye, Scholer lawyer, and not some exotic sideshow. He didn't do anything special; he just gave me a chance to work hard on cases that he and his client thought were important. He also was rigorous in his evaluation of my work; but I knew it was only because he thought that would make me a better lawyer.
My next experience was at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, where I worked for several years with John Pickering, the 1999 recipient of the ABA Medal. Like Fred Livingston before him, John took me under his wings and showed me how to be a lawyer. He gave me the opportunity to handle important matters for his clients, and thereby gave his clients an opportunity to work with me. John also taught me that being a professional required more than just attention to the bottom line, and that the importance of a client's cause was not a function of how much the client could pay the firm; and, more importantly, he did all of this by example.
It is inconceivable to me that either Fred Livingston or John Pickering would have sent me to a meeting with a lawyer junior to me, and asked that lawyer to run the meeting without telling me in advance. The reason it is inconceivable is that neither Fred nor John would treat another colleague that way. And that, in my view, is the key to real diversity in the legal profession.
There is no affirmative action pledge that will produce more meaningful results than what can be achieved by senior partners of law firms actually giving African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Native American, and other lawyers who have not had the opportunity in the past, a meaningful chance to work personally with them on the important matters that they undertake for their most valued clients. Too often, law firms hire promising young lawyers of all races and backgrounds, and then ignore them, until they leave dispirited and sometimes defeated. The simple truth is that real affirmative action occurs after a lawyer is hired. Until we accept that truth, and personally act on it, a lot of well-intentioned effort will continue to disappoint.
