Despite Progress, Challenges to Expanding Diversity in the Profession Remain

While the legal profession and law schools have done an excellent job in the last 30 years of improving opportunities for minorities, they still have a long way to go.

David K. Y. Tang, program moderator, welcomes witnesses to the first fact–finding hearing leading to a national summit on the state of diversity in the Legal Profession in June in Washington, D.C.

That was the consensus of witnesses at a fact-finding hearing at the ABA Midyear Meeting in Boston, where witnesses spoke to challenges facing minorities, women, lawyers with disabilities and lawyers with varying sexual orientations and gender identities. It was the first of four schedule hearings to develop an agenda for the ABA national Summit on the State of Diversity in the Legal Profession to be held in Washington, D.C., in June.

The hearings and the summit are platforms to examine “how the face of diversity has changed,” and to prepare to take meaningful action in the future, said ABA President H. Thomas Wells Jr . Other hearings will be March 18 in Atlanta, March 25 in San Francisco, and April 16 in Columbus, Ohio.

“Money is becoming scarcer,” said Amelia Boss, a professor at Drexel Law School in Philadelphia and a planning committee member. She suggested diversity advocates may need to prioritize projects “in a belt-tightening economy.”

But witnesses responded that diversity makes sound business sense. Susan Klooz, a senior vice president and general counsel at Wal-Mart, said casting a wide net for legal talent provides excellent legal advice and supports the business imperative of helping customers save money and live better.

Michele Mayes, vice president and general counsel of The Allstate Corporation, agreed that the real goal of most companies is to get as much talent as they can.

Richard Matasar, dean of New York Law School, cited the cost of legal education as a barrier to diversity and a burden on all law students. Students are graduating law school with debts exceeding $120,000, said Matasar. Just as people are facing housing foreclosures because they borrowed money “on the hope they can pay it back,” students “got money on the hope they can pay it back.” Sometimes, the graduates with the highest debt earn the least salaries upon graduation, and unlike in past years they may not be able to draw on family resources to repay their loans.

The definition of diversity needs broadening, witnesses and summit organizers said.

“People think disabilities are not diversity,” said Scott Charles LeBarre, a Denver practitioner, planning committee member and president of the National Association of Blind Lawyers. “They think it is just a medical condition.” The challenge is to convince society that persons with disabilities confront the same constitutional issues as more recognized diversity constituencies. LeBarre also cited the public’s tendency to lump persons with varying disabilities into one monolithic group, and to equate disability with lack of ability.