THE RECORD - New York City Bar Association

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M I N O R I T Y R E P R E S E N T A T I O N A N D R E T E N T I O N Adoption of the Statement was a signal act in the history of the Association, and represented public commitments on the part of the Association and the senior managements of law firms and corporate legal departments represented within the Association on an issue of great public importance. Ultimately, 144 New York law firms and the legal departments of 42 corporations became Signatories to the Statement. In the Statement, the Signatories agreed to the following goals: • achieving “participation of Minority lawyers at all professional levels in its law firm or corporate legal department.” (Emphasis added.) • achieving the goal of hiring Minority lawyers “equal to 10 percent of the total number of all lawyers hired by such firm or corporate legal department during the period 1992-1997.” • promoting or inviting to partnership or senior corporate counsel positions Minority lawyers who meet the Signatory’s requisite criteria so that “the number of Minority partners and senior corporate counsel will correspond more closely to the percentage of Minority lawyers hired by the firm or corporate legal department.” These are lofty goals indeed, and the Association and the Signatories can be rightly proud of their participation in this historic undertaking in the cause of equal opportunity and the promotion of greater diversity within the Bar. Aside from adoption of the Statement, the Committee formed a Subcommittee on Recruitment and Retention, chaired by Ira Millstein, which issued a report in May 1992. The Subcommittee conducted a survey of Minority lawyers at firms represented on the Committee, including Minority lawyers who had recently left such firms. In general, the Subcommittee reported that, while a substantial majority of all Minority lawyers reported that their work experiences, their relations with non-Minority lawyers, and the firms’ evaluation of their performance were not different from those of their non-Minority colleagues, African-American associates, in particular, perceived that their experiences were substantially different from those of their non-Minority colleagues. The Subcommittee concluded that African-American lawyers as a group perceive far more race-related barriers to their professional development than do other lawyers, and noted that these perceptions apparently are contributing to or causing disparate levels of retention among different groups of Minorities. T H E R E C O R D 168
T A S K F O R C E O N M I N O R I T I E S, E N H A N C E D I V E R S I T Y I N T H E P R O F E S S I O N The Subcommittee recommended that firms give serious consideration to a number of steps to address these problems, such as diversity training, establishing an internal diversity committee to deal with diversity issues, enhancing orientation training for new associates and re-examining current evaluation processes to ensure clarity and consistency in evaluating Minority and non-Minority associates. 3 In June 1994 the Committee, then under the chairmanship of Ira Millstein, was reorganized to serve as an umbrella committee to coordinate the efforts of other Association committees concerned with diversity issues, including a newly organized Task Force on Minorities, chaired by Vaughn C. Williams, and a Task Force on Women, chaired by Katherine Darrow. 4 On June 17, 1998, the Task Force on Minorities issued a Report, “The Statement of Goals—Six and One-Half Years Later,” evaluating the experiences of Minority employment in law firms since the adoption of the Statement. The Report concludes that the Statement was successful in focusing attention on Minority hiring in the profession, but that its overall success in terms of increasing Minority representation and retention has been mixed. The Task Force concluded that: • The Signatories as a group appear to have met the 10% Minority hiring goal. According to surveys conducted by the New York Law Journal, the average percentage of Minorities hired by the 25 largest firms in New York City, as a group, increased from 13.2% in 1992 to 17.5% for the period 1992 to 1997. 5 3. The Subcommittee also recommended the appointment of a special diversity assistant to the President of the Association. The first such assistant was hired in November 1992. 4. Subsequently, the Committee on Women in the Profession and the Task Force on Women developed, in collaboration with this Committee, a Statement of Goals of New York Law Firms and Legal Departments for the Retention and Promotion of Women, which was similar in many respects to the Statement. The Statement of Goals for Women was promulgated by the Association in April 1998. The two task forces have since been merged into the Committee on Minorities in the Profession and the Committee on Women in the Profession, respectively. 5. The numbers and percentages in the Task Force Report do not relate precisely to the Signatories as a group, but they are thought to be highly indicative of the results for the Signatories. The Task Force relied principally on two sources: (1) Since 1991, the New York Law Journal has published an annual survey of minority hiring by the 25 largest law firms in New York City; these firms are all among the Signatories. (2) The Task Force also created a database of annual employment statistics for minority groups in the 1990-1997 period at 86 of the Signatories that report such statistics to the National Association for Law Placement (NALP); these 86 firms constituted 62% of the Signatories, but some began reporting statistics M A R C H / A P R I L 1 9 9 9 ◆ V O L. 5 4, N O. 2 169
Page 1 and 2: THE RECORD OF THE ASSOCIATION OF TH
Page 3 and 4: MICHAEL A. COOPER President EDITORI
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THE RECORD - New York City Bar Association

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