[ News Article ]
When It Comes to Diversity, Retention a Big Issue for Firms
By Gina Passarella
October 24, 2005
The Legal Intelligencer
Assignments, mentors and culture. Those are the newest challenges in the retention of minority attorneys and were the focus of a Philadelphia Diverse Law Group conference on Friday.
Nolan Atkinson, chairman of the PDLG and litigation partner at Duane Morris, said hiring is no longer the issue when it comes to diversity.
"Every law firm has a commitment to diversity," he said.
The problem is keeping those diverse attorneys.
"The real issue confronting the legal profession is to retain lawyers of color once they are hired," Atkinson said in a statement.
In order for diverse attorneys to remain at major law firms, they need to be given quality assignments, have a mentor that wants to see them succeed and be part of a culture that accepts differences in the firm, Atkinson said.
The morning session of the conference, which had large law firm and corporate representatives, discussed the problems creating a high attrition rate among attorneys of color and women.
The afternoon session focused on solutions to those problems.
The mid-day keynote speaker presented those same issues from the point-of-view of a corporation that is pushing its outside counsel to be diverse or find work elsewhere.
Assistant General Counsel Sam Reeves of Wal-Mart said that in 2003, his company created just three requirements for hiring outside counsel; cost, performance, and diversity.
"I was going to be evaluated on how I was doing to increase the level of diversity in our law firms," Reeves said.
After a year of hearing firms tell him they are working on it, Reeves said his boss joked, "I hope you don't want a Christmas bonus."
Whether it be intellectual property, labor and employment law, or litigation, Reeves said he kept hearing that African-Americans don't practice in that area, or women don't practice in that area of law.
"They were going everywhere else," Reeves said. "Wherever the law firm wasn't."
Wal-Mart got tired of those responses and implemented a program that tried to increase the diversity of its relationship partners, or those partners who are the contact for Wal-Mart's legal team, among its top 100 firms.
Reeves said he saw two missing pieces to the puzzle, accountability on behalf of firm management and empowerment.
The company asked its firms to submit a list of those they felt would be qualified relationship partners. The list had to include at least one woman and one attorney of color, Reeves said.
The second requirement was for the firm to ensure that the relationship partner would not "just be window dressing," Reeves said. The partner had to be empowered to make decisions on strategy and cost, and have the ability to delegate work throughout the firm.
After Wal-Mart received the lists from sometimes-hesitant firm management, the company changed 40 of the 100 relationship attorneys to either women or attorneys of color, Reeves said.
"That's $60 million in business shifted to women and attorneys of color," Reeves said.
He talked about one firm that decided it wasn't pleased with the person Wal-Mart chose from the list, even though the firm put her name there.
The small firm decided that rather than have her as the relationship partner, it would no longer do business with Wal-Mart, a company that gave them close to $500,000 in legal work each year, Reeves said.
He said Wal-Mart terminated one firm that did not embrace its diversity efforts. Reeves said firms must show a good-faith effort and good results too.
The mantra Reeves hears repeatedly from his boss is "don't confuse efforts with results."
That is something the company is taking seriously, and is seriously questioning why firms aren't doing the same.
"Wal-Mart is serious about it; performance, cost, diversity," Reeves reiterated.
"I don't think anybody's suggesting that law firms have done anything revolutionary . . . ever," Reeves said, talking about the lack of change in law firms over the last 100 years.
One solution that Reeves offered was for firms to send both their diverse and nondiverse attorneys to ethnic bar association and diversity events so that the two groups have more cause to interact.
He said that is one of his company's greatest recruiting tools as well.
One statistic that Atkinson took away from the morning session was in reference to the booming population growth in California of people who are not Caucasian.
"If we do not do better than we have done in the past, Philadelphia based firms will not remain competitive relative to other regions in the country," he said in a statement.
The PDLG is a group of not only law firms but corporations as well or are committed to seeing more diversity in the law firms that represent them.
"What was particularly significant," Atkinson said, "was the call from the corporate sector to the law firms to fix the problem of retention of diverse lawyers now if they wished to remain competitive to do legal work for major corporations."
Some of the corporate members of the PDLG include, AstraZeneca, Aramark, GlaxoSmithKline and Sunoco.
Some of the firm sponsors of the event included Montgomery McCracken Walker & Rhoads, Wolf Block, Drinker Biddle & Reath, Reed Smith and Stradley Ronon Stevens & Young.
The group has 26 members and was created in 2001.
This article originally appeared in The Legal Intelligencer and is republished here with permission from law.com.