Legal News

Ex-Staff Attorney Takes Aim at BigLaw Minority Hiring

By Dan Slater

Covington began stockpiling its staff attorney ghetto with blacks and other minorities in 2005, shortly after the General Council [sic] of some of the country’s largest companies [took] a tougher stance on law firm diversity. . . . Covington has certainly diversified its firm; however, its attorneys are far from equals. The vast majority of Covington’s black attorneys do no substantive work, have no control over their case assignments and no opportunity for advancement. — Yolanda Young, The Huffington Post

In recent years, major companies like Wal-Mart and Sara Lee have directed that their outside law firms increase the number of women and minorities among associate and partner ranks. The effort began when Roderick A. Palmore, Sara Lee’s general counsel, wrote a letter encouraging other GC’s to end or limit “relationships with firms whose performance consistently evidences a lack of meaningful interest in being diverse.”

Since then reports have varied as to how successful firm diversification efforts have been. But, according to Yolanda Young, who worked briefly as a staff attorney at Covington & Burling’s D.C. office, they’ve not been successful. In yesterday’s HuffPo, Young writes that Covington hired blacks into its staff attorney program after the call for greater diversity.

“Covington’s black staff attorneys (like its black partners and associates) hail from top law schools like Harvard, Duke and Georgetown, while several white associates and partners attended schools like Catholic, Kentucky and Villanova (all ranked well below 50),” claims Young. “Taken as a whole, the black staff attorneys’ average law school rank is higher than that of white staff attorneys at the firm.” Young writes that blacks at Covington comprise less than 5% of the Washington office’s partners and associates, but make up 30% of its staff attorneys.

Young, a graduate of Georgetown law school, also has written for USA Today and the WaPo. After law school, she published a memoir, “On Our Way To Beautiful” (Random House).

Update: We just got a statement from Covington. Here are the highlights:

“In the case of our staff attorneys, we’ve been very successful in recruiting African-American lawyers. . . . We offer competitive compensation and benefits, which we will likely further enhance in the near future. This includes the innovative benefit of pay for pro bono work, and our staff attorneys average about 70 hours of pro bono work a year. Our staff attorneys are a stable, productive and respected part of our workforce. Part of this stability can be attributed to our recruitment process, which has benefited from the great number of referrals from our current staff attorneys.

Overall, African-Americans are about 5% of our combined partners, counsel and associates. While we have had less success in terms of our percentage of African-American lawyers in these groups, it is not because we have made less of an effort, and we are making progress here as well. For instance, roughly 10% of the lawyers we hired during the past two years are African-American. Over time, we are hopeful that these percentages or higher percentages will be reflected in our overall numbers.”

LB Readers: Anyone out there familiar with the racial demographics of staff attorney programs? Is Young’s experience at Covington representative of a trend in firms’ diversity efforts?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 18, 2008 (boomark / email).