[A]s I look at the quickly changing opinions, I can’t help but wonder whether the General Counsels of America’s top companies, Black and white, are listening. Do they finally get the necessity for big change in the legal profession to calibrate the scales? Will they finally step up to the plate and aggressively address the inequalities or will they refrain to the convenient, easy and usual by endorsing another letter fecklessly decrying the lack of diversity on their matters, without more.
Will these self-described supporters of diversity and opportunity in the profession finally step-up and engage in meaningful efforts to address the lack of accessibility to meaningful work, business and opportunities for Black and other minority lawyers? Or will they simply fall back on the same old explanation that they are expecting the law firms that they use to self-regulate and do more to diversify and provide professional opportunities to Black people; notwithstanding the absurdity of that proposition. Will they again provide my people of color scraps and meaningless amounts of work or will they step up and offer real and lasting change?
— Donald Prophete, a partner at Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete, in a moving essay published at Corporate Counsel, where he calls for general counsels to stop relying on law firms to moove the needle on diversity and do some of the work themselves by offering meaningful work to people of color. “[I]t’s true that no Black lawyer has ever died from asphyxiation from a literal knee on his neck in one of the law firms’ ivory towers. At least not to my knowledge,” he writes. “However, I can provide a list a mile long of able lawyers whose careers have been asphyxiated by the knee on the neck of lack of opportunity to good work, good files, objective measurement and access to the same business opportunities as their white counterparts.”
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.