Attorneys Working Toward the Tipping Point for Diversity - The Bar ...

“There was a very deliberate effort by those involved in recruiting,”
and a team effort, says West. “It was certainly why
I wanted to be hiring partner. I wanted it to be a rule that we
hired 50 percent students of color. We are able to make that
an institutional reality.”
West feels confident those numbers will continue. “I know
it is the philosophy of our chairman, Keith Wetmore,” he
says. “If we are going to get to the point where we really need
to be, which is that the profession reflects the richness of the
community we serve, then diversity has to be part and parcel
to any business plan. It has to be so ingrained in the way
we think about how we grow the profession, how we grow
firms, how we recruit, how we make a profit, that we don’t
think about it. And we are not there yet.”
“If we are going to get
to the point where
we really need to be,
which is that the profession
reflects the richness
of the community we serve,
then diversity has to be
part and parcel
to any business plan”
And as for the claim there are not enough high-quality minority
candidates “That is just not true,” he says. “It is true
that large law firms tend to compete for the same students
from Boalt, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and the like. But what
that misses is that there are talented students of color in many
places, coming out of many law schools. If your focus is on
talent, as opposed to pedigree, you can be successful in recruiting
talented attorneys of color.”
West and fellow San Francisco partner Walter Conroy did it
by recruiting at schools like Howard University, a historically
black university in Washington, D.C. “One of our star summer
associates from last summer, Michele Thomas, was a
Howard law graduate. We had not been to Howard before,”
West says. West also met strong candidates through the various
organizations and political groups in which he is active.
“You find legal talent in so many different places. One of the
individuals we had as a summer associate is someone I met
in the Charles Houston Bar Association. Another person,
whom we offered a summer associate position for next summer,
I first met while working on Barack Obama’s campaign.”
(West is one of the cochairs of Obama’s presidential
efforts in California.)
West says the firm didn’t have any particular reaction to the
diversity of the summer class, “other than we had a really
good group of students as summer associates
coming through.”
“I feel good about what we have done, but I am not satisfied
where we are,” says West. “I’m excited about the challenge of
continuing to do more.”
“Clearly, I always have been cognizant of the fact that I am
one of a very few African American partners in a major law
firm. I’ve been very fortunate; others have paved the way for
me. It has always been uppermost in my mind that there is
perhaps a special responsibility that I carry to make sure
the door is open for others. I don’t want to be the exception
to the rule. I want to be the example of what the rule
should be.”
That said, West says he believes he has a special responsibility
to remind others “that it [diversity] is everyone’s job.”
KAMALA HARRIS
When you talk with Kamala Harris about diversity in the
profession, don’t expect her to talk about the business case for
diversity. For the city’s district attorney, diversity runs much
deeper than that.
“Diversity is critical to good law enforcement. We stand up
in the courtroom every day and declare we are representing
the people, and the people means all the people. In order for
us to do that appropriately, we need to be connected with,
accessible to, and in touch with all the people in our community.
We have a diverse community, and it’s important that
the experiences of those communities are present when the
people are represented.”
Harris, who was reelected in November, and her sister Maya
Harris, who is executive director of the ACLU of Northern
California, are among the highest profile attorneys of color
in the city. Since Harris was first elected district attorney in
December 2003 (according to her Wikipedia entry, she’s the
city’s first woman, the state’s first African American woman,
and the country’s first Indian American district attorney),
she has been able to increase the diversity of the office. Some
85 percent of her new hires from 2004 to 2006 have been
women, people of color, or LGBT, she says.
THE BAR ASSOCIATION OF SAN FRANCISCO SAN FRANCISCO ATTORNEY 21