Diversity initiative advances women of color in law school

Tiffany R. Harper and Chasity A. Boyce once tried to name how many black female lawyers they knew in Chicago in or around their class year who still worked in law firms. They came up with 11, including themselves.

They knew the statistics. Only 2.55 percent of law firm partners are women of color, according to the National Association for Law Placement 2015 to 2016 Directory of Legal Employers and that problem starts with how few women of color there are in law school.

“We would hate to look up in 10 years and see that there’s nobody that looks like us coming behind us,” Boyce said.

They were tired of people writing and holding panels — including their own, as they’re both past presidents of the Black Women Lawyers’ Association of Greater Chicago — and asking, “What’s happening?” but nothing changing.

Harper, in-house counsel and diversity leader at Grant Thornton LLP, and Boyce, diversity and inclusion projects manager at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, decided to do something about it.

They created the Diverse Attorney Pipeline Program, which helps women of color students succeed in their first year of law school.

Students get extra classroom sessions, take practice tests together, are assigned women of color attorney or academic mentors, learn how to network and speak in interviews, get headshots, have their resumes edited and get help applying to summer work opportunities. Sessions are weekly, or Boyce and Harper might see students as much as every day during intense finals weeks.

The American Bar Association Section of Litigation awarded the program the 2016 Diversity Leadership Award, recognizing its commitment to promoting diversity in the legal profession. Next year, Harper and Boyce plan to expand the program to five of the six Chicago law schools and the possibility of establishing the program in two schools in Washington, D.C.

When they came up with the idea in 2013, Harper said they never thought they would be founding a huge organization.

Boyce said they didn’t have the curriculum or logistics worked out when they reached out to Loyola University Chicago School of Law to pitch a pilot program, but they found an expansive network of women of color lawyers and people who wanted to boost women of color to become lawyers.

“Their enthusiasm about it probably drove us a little bit more,” Boyce said.

They ran it as a pilot program for its first two years, with three students from Loyola starting in 2014 and five students from The John Marshall Law School starting in 2015.

This year, there are 11 students: four from Loyola, four from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and three from DePaul University College of Law.

Harper said they turned away 70 percent of applicants because they didn’t have the time or financial resources to take more.

“The need is definitely there, it’s just a question of how do we meet the need,” Harper said.

Carrera Thibodeaux, a third-year law student at Loyola University Chicago School of Law who was part of the first year of the Diverse Attorney Pipeline Program, said she didn’t know if she would still be in law school if it weren’t for the program.

Thibodeaux is the first person in her family to pursue the law, so she couldn’t call her parents to ask what law school would be like.

“I was really going off of what I read in blogs that I googled,” Thibodeaux said. “There was no way I was going to survive law school going off of googled blogs.”

Harper said she saw how necessary Diverse Attorney Pipeline Program support was for its students immediately. Class discussions about race made students feel isolated and students had moved away from friends and family for law school and couldn’t call them for legal advice.

“We saw a lot of the effect of being in law school and being a women of color impact them very early on,” Harper said.

Harper said women of color law students are constantly fighting the statistics, thinking, “More likely than not, I won’t be partner, because only 0.64 percent of partners are black women according to the NALP (National Association of Law Placement).”

“It’s just a daunting statistic that you constantly have in the back of your head,” Harper said. “We want them to be able to push past that.”

Thibodeaux said the program shed light on what was coming up next, which helped her prepare to get hit with the difficulties of law school and trying to enter legal practice.

Her summer after finishing her first year at law school, Thibodeaux spent six weeks working at Arnstein & Lehr LLP and the six weeks working for a federal judge.

“They got us to the interview table and then I was able to use the skills that I had been taught during the program to basically close the deal, for lack of better words,” Thibodeaux said.

Thibodeaux returned to Arnstein & Lehr for the full summer of 2016.

For the first two years, Harper and Boyce funded the program out of their pockets. For the 2016 to 2017 academic year, they raised more than $11,000 on a Kickstarter drive and have law firms sponsors.

If they had more money, Harper said they would hire tutors for their students. Harper and Boyce said they spend 30 or 40 hours a week running the program in addition to their jobs. They would also buy more study aid materials and help fund buying head shots and polishing their students’ resumes.

The Diverse Attorney Pipeline Program also added a seven-person board of directors this year that helps with fundraising, marketing and programming. Harper and Boyce hope that creating that structure will make it easier to expand into other cities.

For the 2017 to 2018 academic year, Boyce said the program will run at five of the six Chicago law schools: Loyola, Northwestern, DePaul, John Marshall and Chicago-Kent College of Law. It may also expand to Washington, D.C., running at Howard University School of Law and Georgetown University Law Center.

Harper said the program is about empowerment. While white male lawyers see examples of people who look like them all over the legal profession, she said the Diverse Attorney Pipeline Program students benefit from knowing mentors who look like them and who can support them as they face similar challenges.

“I would love to one day be working for one of my Pipeline students,” Harper said. “That’s the goal.”