Collaboration, Practical Solutions Among Goals of National Summit on Legal Profession Diversity

American Bar Association presidents past, present and future unified in a pledge to strengthen the connections among lawyers bridging barriers of race, ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity, launched the Presidential Summit on Diversity in the Legal Profession: The Next Steps, June 18 in National Harbor, Md.

ABA President H. Thomas Wells Jr.

The summit was called by President H. Thomas Wells Jr. of Birmingham, who invited 150 leaders from commerce, industry, private practice, academia and the judiciary to collaborate in pursuit of new and effective ways to overcome “diversity fatigue” and move forward. He commended Eduardo Rodriguez of Brownsville, Texas, and North Carolina Court of Appeals Justice James B. Wynn of Raleigh, summit chairs.

“When gifted women and men of diverse backgrounds face systemic barriers, it is not just a lack of opportunity for those individuals. It is a loss of opportunity for the legal profession,” said Wells.

“Diversity is a core value of the legal profession, one I’ve chosen to highlight,” Wells said as he welcomed the assemblage.

“We need to make those connections. Any degree of success we achieve is going to be best accomplished through collaboration,” said Wells.

ABA President-Elect Carolyn B. Lamm

President-Elect Carolyn B. Lamm of Washington, D.C., commended the commitment and leadership of summit attendees, and called on them to help her “make sure all lawyers can reach their full potential” without regard to factors irrelevant to their professional and leadership skills. She urged her colleagues to identify practical steps, and vowed to move them forward.

Wells recalled that Dennis Archer of Detroit led the ABA’s modern era of diversity outreach starting in 1984, when he chaired a Young Lawyers Division task force focused on race and ethnicity among lawyers. Archer became the association’s first African American president in 2003.

On his way to the ABA presidency, Archer was first chair of the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Profession, and launched a minority counsel program in 1987 that has been emulated across the country, challenging corporate users of legal services to ensure that diverse lawyers performed their work, noted Wells. Archer has spent his career “looking ahead and reaching a hand back to help pull up those who came afterwards,” Wells said.

ABA Past President Dennis Archer

The future, said Archer, promises “the browning of America.” The emerging demographics of the United States promise a population of people of color with dollars to spend, and discretion about how to spend it. While “things have really changed” and lawyers of color have progressed in the last quarter century, “we’ve got to, all of us, encourage young people to come to the profession,” starting in elementary school and moving forward.

Archer urged attendees to pool their efforts and their brilliance to identify steps that really work.

“We cannot afford to take a step backwards,” he said.