In ‘Thurgood,’ Laurence Fishburne approaches the bench mark.  Catch the act at Washington’s Kennedy Center. WaPo

This defense attorney really is kick-ass! ATL

Groundbreaking retired judge, Damon Keith, gets facility groundbreaking with AG on hand. FreePress

Pa. court: Black lawyer rejected by Pa. bar in 1847 because of race admitted posthumously. GeaTimes

N.J. Senate president blasts Christie for not reappointing Supreme Court Justice Wallace, only Af Am judge. NJ.com

For NBA members, law is more than a career—it’s a commitment. United by a need to serve their communities, African American lawyers from across the nation attend the National Bar’s Annual Convention. This year, the National Bar Association and IMPACT will produce the first annual Nation’s Best Advocates (N.B.A.): 40 Lawyers Under 40 Gala at the 85th Annual Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Do you know an African American Lawyer, 40 or under, who is doing great things in the legal community? Share their story with the world by nominating this young lawyer for Nation’s Best Advocates: 40 Lawyers Under 40 This year, the National Bar Association and IMPACT will produce the first annual Nation’s Best Advocates (N.B.A.): 40 Lawyers Under 40 at the 85th Annual Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana. The purpose of this prestigious award is to recognize talented individuals (age 40 and under) within the African American legal community who have achieved prominence and distinction in their fields. Successful nominees will have demonstrated a strong commitment to empowering, uplifting, and advocating for the African American community. Nominees should represent a cross-section of legal professionals: solo practitioners, government lawyers, judges, academicians, corporate counsels, young elected officials, and others lawyers who are using their law degree in innovative ways. Winners are chosen based on: achievement, innovation, vision, leadership, and legal community involvement.

From NLJ:

Zhu sought to figure out whether race plays a role in law school hiring. Law schools have been under pressure since the 1980s to boost the number of minority faculty members, which often is seen as a key to increasing minority student enrollment. In turn, higher minority enrollment is a cornerstone of increasing diversity throughout the legal profession.

Zhu analyzed data on 889 candidates:

Of the 889 candidates, 191 — just more than 21% — were hired by the following academic year, according to Zhu’s study. Minorities made up nearly 20% of those who were hired, but Asians, blacks and Latinos were all more likely than whites to be hired. Asians topped the list of successful hires, with nearly 43% of candidates landing a position. About 29% of Latino candidates got jobs, while slightly more than 24% of black candidates were hired. By comparison, about 21% of white applicants landed positions.

Zhu concludes:

“Taken alone, these results seem like a good sound-byte for the argument that minorities are being preferred in faculty hiring,” the report says. It notes, however, that without more information on qualifications, it’s impossible to know if the hiring decisions were a result of affirmative action or a stronger minority applicant pool.

The picture gets a bit murkier when it comes to where minority applicants were offered jobs. “Examining the placement of the hired candidates, it is immediately clear that minorities do considerably worse than non-minorities in terms of placement,” the study reads.

Earlier this month, The Legal Intelligencer affiliate The American Lawyerreported on a development that was as disheartening as it was expected. Citing its own yearly surveys of National Law Journal 250 firms, the legal profession’s flagship publication found that the percentage of lawyers from racial minority groups practicing at the nation’s largest firms decreased in 2009.

The decrease in percentage terms was relatively small — from 13.9 percent to 13.4 percent. But it was significant because it was the first such decrease in the 10-year history of the Am Law “Diversity Scorecard” survey, and because data from the survey combined with other factors suggest cause for more serious concern over the longer term.

I believe that we lawyers who work at large firms have an obligation to respond to this development in a manner that advances our commitment to greater diversity to a higher level. We are threatened with irrelevance if we don’t.

Read full opinion piece here.

Roxanne E. Covington is making great strides in Philadelphia, Pa. as a newly elected judge of the Court of Common Pleas. She took the oath of office during a swearing-in ceremony in January. In her new capacity, Covington will serve as a judge in the Criminal Courts Division.

During the November 2009 election, Covington led a field of more than 20 candidates for a seat on the Court of Common Pleas. Covington is the only African American and African American female elected to the bench in Philadelphia during the 2009 election. She is also the youngest judge serving in the Philadelphia court system.

Full story here:

Full report here:  Before reading the highlights provided below, you might want to take a Xanax.

One Step Back:  For the first time in years, the population of minority lawyers at big law firms is shrinking.

The drop in law firm diversity may be small, but it’s important. Overall, big firms shed 6 percent of their attorneys between 2008 and 2009–and, amid the bloodletting, lost 9 percent of their minority lawyers. (Here and elsewhere in this story, we’ve calculated such percentages only for the 191 firms that provided numbers in both years, in order to have a consistent basis for comparison.) Diversity advocates call the drop a warning sign that shouldn’t be ignored. “I think [that] when you’re looking at any numbers of a population you’re trying to increase, and you see a decrease, that’s significant,” says Venu Gupta, executive director of the Chicago Committee on Minorities in Large Law Firms. “I guess I hoped we wouldn’t be going backward,” echoes Fred Alvarez, chair of the American Bar Association Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Profession and a Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati partner.

In Retreat:  The legal industry’s wave of recession-induced layoffs appears to have hit African American associates particularly hard.

The legal industry’s wave of recession-induced layoffs appears to have hit African American associates particularly hard. At the 191 firms that took part in our survey this year and last, the absolute number of African American associates fell from 2,826 to 2,362. In 2008, African Americans made up 4.7 percent of the broader nonpartner pool; in 2009, they were down to 4.4 percent–a 16 percent decline that did not surprise some.

But wait, there is some good news after the jump…

Swimming Against the Tide:  Fourteen large firms lost at least 10 percent of their U.S. head count and still upped their percentage of minority lawyers.

Fourteen large firms lost at least 10 percent of their U.S. head count and still upped their percentage of minority lawyers. And while they may not have actually added many minority lawyers, at least they avoided large net losses. One of the biggest improvements came at Dallas-based Winstead (rising from number 87 to number 66 on the Diversity Scorecard), where the percentage of minority lawyers rose from 11.4 percent to 13.4 percent. Winstead had a net gain of one minority lawyer while laying off or accepting the voluntary departures of 13 percent of its lawyers. “There was no pointed effort to save minority lawyers from layoffs,” says Winstead partner Teresa Schnei der, the firm’s director of professional development. “Our numbers simply illustrate the importance we put on diversity in years past.” The firm retooled its diversity program starting in 2007, she says, nearly tripling its diversity budget and hiring a consultant who revamped Winstead’s recruiting efforts to better account for minority applicants. The firm also tied practice group leaders’ compensation to their ability to recruit minority lawyers.

Prudential and about a dozen other companies, including DuPont and Microsoft, pledged Thursday to spend $30 million in 2010 on minority- and women-owned law firms.

In-house lawyers at DuPont and Prudential hatched the idea and recruited in-house lawyers at other companies to build a larger coalition, Blount tells us. Like many large companies with big legal budgets, Prudential has for several years included diversity among the criteria by which it divides work among its huge outside law firms. With this commitment, Prudential and its allies will direct more money toward smaller minority- and women-owned shops, she says. “There are issues in our profession in terms of bringing in people from diverse backgrounds and, frankly, having women and people from diverse backgrounds experience success in the long haul,” she says.

Deferred start dates for first-year associates at many firms may help explain what became of some of the missing minority attorneys. Because our survey asked for data as of Sept. 30, 2009, deferred first-years were not included in the firms’ head count. (Milbank, for instance, deferred its starting class, which included 33 minority associates, from fall 2009 to January 2010.) That’s important because entering classes tend to be more diverse than the firms they join. Once those associates start work — and some already have — their presence should increase their firms’ diversity statistics.

This optimistic scenario points to an inconvenient truth about large law firm diversity. “For a long time, the way that law firms beefed up their diversity numbers was really to have a lot of diverse associates in the first-and second-year classes,” says Gupta from the Chicago Committee on Minorities. If a firm didn’t hold on to its minority associates — and many didn’t — it was relatively easy, Gupta says, to hire more in the next recruiting season.

There is also the issue of the “stealth” layoff:

What will be the long-term impact of this year’s drop in minority lawyers? “My fear is that even though it is a half-percentage point [decline], it’s a half-percentage point that will not correct itself, and it will increase over the next two years,” says consultant Reeves. In addition to slower recruiting, Reeves says, “we also saw a lot of minorities quietly being ‘evaluated out’ in the last quarter.”

Full story at Law.com.

This year’s speech didn’t offer the kind of “nation of coward” catch phrases OBABL is so very fond of; nevertheless, Mr. Holder’s message resonated.

DOJ:

For well over two centuries now, we, as a people, have been striving to build a more perfect union - an America where the words of our Constitution can, finally, reach the full measure of their intent. The work of the Justice Department is, and always has been, critical to this pursuit. As a law student and as a young prosecutor in our Public Integrity Section, I dreamed of contributing to this Department. Today, as Attorney General, I have the honor and responsibility of leading it. I also have the privilege of serving with colleagues who share my commitment to this work. Like you, I have great faith in our justice system. In fact, I’d argue that it’s among the most praiseworthy aspects of our national character. But I also realize this hasn’t always been the case.

Despite the great progress we’ve seen in my lifetime, it wasn’t so long ago that African Americans were prevented from owning property, attaining home or business loans, and joining unions. The legal framework we celebrate today - the same system that abolished slavery, encouraged women’s suffrage and ended segregation - once served as a barrier for black families struggling to build wealth and for black children who sought an adequate education.

There was a time when this very Department undermined the rights and privileges it was established to preserve. There was a time when it was accepted, almost universally across our country, that the American principles of justice, liberty and equality did not have to be applied equally to blacks and whites, or to women and men. For much of the last century, our justice system did not do enough to help our nation fulfill its promise of equal opportunity. And, as a result, the doors of economic prosperity remained closed to too many Americans on the basis of their race.

This recent study in the Southern California Review of Law and Social Justice will not help them.

Deans and admissions officers told the researchers that the pressure to maintain or improve their U.S. News rankings can mean fewer slots for diverse students, who tend to score lower on the LSAT and have lower grade point averages. “Selectivity” — LSAT scores, undergraduate grades and schools’ degree of exclusivity in accepting applicants — accounts for one quarter of each school’s ranking.

Law firms have jumped on the bandwagon and are blaming the study for their decreasing diversity numbers as well:

The apparent negative relationship between the U.S. News rankings and diversity is bad news for major law firms, which face their own struggles with hiring and retaining minority attorneys. The latest Diversity Scorecard by NLJ affiliate The American Lawyer showed that the percentage of minority attorneys at large U.S. firms dropped slightly during the past year to 13.4%. Law firm leaders routinely cite the relatively small number of minority law school graduates as a hurdle to improving their own diversity.

Reporting from The National Law Journal.

A Leflore County jury decided Tuesday for Michael Archie.

It set the price of his ability to use the lower half of his body at $12 million.

The a-mount is to be paid by the owner and security guard at the Itta Bena club where Archie, an innocent bystander, was shot on Jan. 26, 2003.

The former basketball player at Greenwood High School and Mississippi Valley State University has been a paraplegic since.

Archie’s attorney, Carlos Moore of Grenada, said the family is pleased with the verdict but would give anything to have Archie back up and walking.

“That is simply priceless,” Moore said in a prepared statement released after the jury returned its verdict just before noon Tuesday.

In one text Hill confesses, “Im a fast c—.”  Click here to fill in the blank and view Hill in all his glory.  Well, almost–LARGE hearts and bubbles cover the money shots.

Thanks to Hill’s nifty product placement, the Spurs were soon drawn into the drama, instructing their lawyer to fire off a missive to TheDirty.  Read the full letter via HuffPo:

This letter is formal notice of the Spurs’ objection to the display of photographs of Spurs’ player George Hill on thedirty.com’s website.  More specifically, thedirety.com has caused or permitted photographs of Mr. Hill in an unclothed state to be posed on its website.  Moreover, the website expressly references Mr. Hill’s status as a BA player for San Antonio and contains a hyperlink to a photograph of Mr. Hill in a Spurs’ uniform.  The website also links to phtographs of Mr. Hill in various states of undress and phtographs that contain messages meant for a particular private recipient.

The content of this site is clearly aimed at prurient and sexually explicit interest that should not be associated with the Spurs…

That was all fine and good until TheDirty’s lawyer penned what amounts to a written bitch slap.  It begins thusly:

TRADEMARK LAW DOES NOT APPLY TO CRITICISM OF CELEBRITIES MAKING FOOLS OF THEMSELVES

Then continues:

…you contend that trademark law and related torts prevent the publication of Mr. Hill’s name and/or image simply because www.TheDirty.com is a hudgely successful commercial site…

Since you have not cited any authority for this premise, I assume you could not find any.  That’s not surprising since as Paris Hilton, Tiger Woods, or Britney Spears could explain to you, this argument is totally without merit.  Strangely, many people seem to share this mistaken belief that the Lanham Act prevents all uses of a trademark without the holder’s permission.  Thankfully for The Dirty, TMZ, etc., this is not the law; it is an urban myth:

Finally, there is this:

I realize that NBA fans in the San Antonio are may not be so sophisticated, particular if any of them have opted to support Mr. Hill and the Spurs rather than the undeniably superior Dallas Mavericks (excluding Shawn Marion who hasn’t been the same since he left Phoenix).

Jarvious Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole. –From ‘The New Jim Crow’.

This from the cover of former Stanford Law School Associate Professor, Michelle Alexander’s new book, “The New Jim Crow:  Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it.  In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt.  So we don’t.  Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.  To it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans.  Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination–employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service–are suddenly legal.  As a criminal you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow.  We have not ended racial caste in America.  we have merely redesigned it.

RestoreFairness has a more in depth review of the book.  The organization is working to restore due process and fairness to our immigration system.

The ABA formally issued its “Diversity in the Legal Profession:  The Next Steps” Report. According to the ABA Diversity Commission:

Diversity approaches, according to the study, need to be inclusive, not pigeon-holing lawyers into affinity groups by discrete racial and ethnic categories, gender, sexual orientation or disability.  At the same time, barriers may differ by practice setting, meaning the strategies to increase diversity cannot be one-size-fits-all, the study suggests.

It also asserted four rationales for diversity:

• Lawyers and judges have a unique responsibility for sustaining democracy
• The profession must be diverse to thrive in a global and domestically inclusive business environment
• Diversity is critical if the profession wishes to maintain a societal leadership role
• Changing demographics in society compel the profession to change its own demographics

The Midyear Meeting also held an interesting panel, Diversity on the Bench:  Is the “Wise Latina” a Myth? Two studies suggest it may not be.

In Myth of The Color-Blind Judge:  An Empirical Analysis of Racial Harassment Cases, Pat Chew and Robert Kelley:

African American judges rule differently than White judges, even when one takes into account their political affiliation or certain characteristics of the case. Our findings further suggest that judges of all races are attentive to the relevant facts of the cases but may reach different conclusions depending on their races.  When race, political affiliation, and certain case characteristics are all considered simultaneously, the role that race plays loses some statistical significance (as one might expect given the increasing number of variables).

While we cannot predict how an individual judge might act, our empirical analysis suggests that African American judges as a group and White judges as a group perceive racial harassment differently. These findings counter the traditional myth that the race of a judge would not make a difference—a myth premised on a presumption of a formalistic and objective decision-making process.

In “Female Judges Matter: Gender and Collegial Decisionmaking in the Federal Appellate Courts” Jennifer Peresie writes:

The data also indicate that an indirect effect existed: Male judges were more likely to find for plaintiffs when at least one female judge was on the panel.81 Because the regressions controlled for ideology, the results indicate that regardless of the ideology of the male judge, sitting on a panel with a female judge increased the likelihood that he found for the plaintiff. As Figure 2 illustrates, adding a female judge to the panel more than doubled the probability that a male judge ruled for the plaintiff in sexual harassment cases (increasing the probability from 16% to 35%) and nearly tripled this probability in sex discrimination cases (increasing it from 11% to 30%). Further, conservative male judges were affected as much as liberal male judges were by the presence of a female judge.

The meeting also highlighted its Judicial Clerkship Program with this neat video:

For more information, see the ABA’s Center For Racial & Ethnic Diversity webpage.

A former staff attorney of Covington & Burling can proceed with her federal discrimination claim over the law firm’s policy of assigning work, based on a disparate impact theory.

However, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton found that Yolanda Young had waited too long to bring a similar claim that the firm’s refusal to promote her to an associate position also was discriminatory, reports the Blog of Legal Times.

Walton OK’d the work-assignment claim because it involves a recurring issue that is revisited at annual reviews each year, the law blog explains. Young argues that the firm’s policies have a disparate impact because, she alleges, the staff attorney group is disproportionately black.

Says Yolanda Young’s attorney:

“My client is pleased to be able to pursue the disparate impact claim because it is not every day that a court allows that kind of claim to move forward,” attorney Latif Doman, who is representing Young, tells the BLT. “As we move forward with discovery, it will be clear that African-American staff attorneys are put through a similar system as white associates but are not being judged in the same manner.”

Kamisha Menns, a black woman born in Jamaica, says in the complaint, filed in D.C. Superior Court on Wednesday, that Howrey violated the D.C. Human Rights Act by retaliating against her, creating a hostile work environment, and inflicting emotional distress, both intentionally and negligently. Menns has asked for $30 million.

According the complaint, Menns was heavily recruited by Howrey only to be subjected to discriminatory treatment once staffed in their Brussels office.

At some point after moving to Brussels, Menns says in her complaint, she began being removed from projects despite receiving compliments on her work from several partners. She says her workplace was shifted to a different floor from that of other lawyers. When she reached out to the office’s managing partner, Trevor Soames, the complaint alleges, Menns was told “that because she was an ‘impressive woman’ Ms. Menns made Howrey’s white employees feel uncomfortable.” The complaint alleges that Soames also told her that because she was the first black associate to work in the office, the office staff’s treatment of her might be influenced by the fact that “they had never before been forced to be in a ’subordinate position’ to a black person.”

The complaint goes on to allege that the situation only got worse when she reached out to firm leaders, including the Washington-based diversity committee and CEO Robert Ruyak. In a June 2, 2009, meeting, a day after Menns sent an e-mail to Ruyak and eight members of the diversity committee outlining the allegedly discriminatory treatment, Menns was fired.

A billboard displaying a picture of the executive and his mistress, YaVaughnie Wilkins, during happier times went up recently in Atlanta, New York and San Francisco.

Gawker broke the story:

The pair first come to light in a mysterious Times Square billboard we posted about on Tuesday. The billboards included the address of a romantic online photo album,CharlesPhillipsAndYaVaughnieWilkins.com, and a quote attributed to “C.E.P.:” “You are my soulmate forever!” Our readers quickly figured out that the man in the billboard was Oracle’s Charles Phillips, and we wondered if the co-president was emulating his attention-grubbing boss, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. But then came evidence of Phillips’ marriage to one Karen Phillips, who Charles Phillips called his wife in a 2006 interview and who appeared with him in the society pages recently. We wondered if Wilkins wasn’t out for revenge.

Ms. Wilkins also unveiled a website with post cards, photos–one of which is a man with painted toe nails and lingerie (might that be Mr. Phillips?)–and notes written on hotel stationary.  The website has since been removed, but Gawker was kind enough to produce their own photo gallery of some especially touching touchy kodak moments.

In February 2009, Phillips was appointed as a member to the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide President Barack Obama and his administration with advice and counsel regarding the economy.

This couldn’t get much worse for Mr. Phillips.  Let’s just hope his wife doesn’t take to his head with a golf club…

Breaking:  The billboard in Atlanta has been taken down.  Perhaps none of this happened at all.

From ATL:

An ATL reader alerted us that Raven Akram, an attorney at Sandberg Phoenix, moonlights as an NFL cheerleader for the St. Louis Rams. Sandberg Phoenix is a 65-attorney trial firm with “seriously unbelievable client service.” Akram joined the firm’s St. Louis office in 2008.

Over the relevant 15-year period, the study — conducted in conjunction with the Society of American Law Teachers, found that the total number of African-Americans and Mexican-Americans entering law school dropped from 4,142 in 1993 to 4,060 in 2008. Combined with the increase in overall law school capacity (from 43,520 to 46,500), that translated into a 7.5 percent and 11.7 percent decrease of African-American and Mexican-American first-year law students, respectively.

“It’s like imagining Carnegie Hall, which seats almost 3,000 people, filled to capacity but no Mexican-Americans or African-Americans allowed in,” says Conrad Johnson, the Columbia professor who oversees the clinic, regarding the additional spots created over the past 15 years. “For many African-American and Mexican-American students, law school is an elusive goal.”

How elusive? Between 2003 and 2008, 61 percent of African-American and 46 Mexican-American applicants were rejected by every law school to which they applied, according to Law School Admissions Council data reviewed by the clinic’s researchers. The “shut-out” rate for white applicants was 34 percent.

According to his campaign:

Mayor-Elect Kasim Reed was raised in the Cascade community. He was educated in Fulton County’s public schools where he graduated from Utoy Springs Elementary School and Westwood High School (now Westlake High School) and went to Howard University, where he received his undergraduate and law degrees.

Though Mayor-Elect Reed was the youngest Democratic State Senator, he had a well-established track record of legislative excellence. He was first elected to the Georgia General Assembly in 1998 as State Representative for District 52. He was re-elected in 2000, winning seventy-seven percent (77%) of all votes cast. In the House, Mayor-Elect Reed served two terms as a member of the House Judiciary Committee, Education Committee and Legislative and Congressional Reapportionment Committee.

Mayor-Elect Kasim Reed served as campaign manager for Mayor Shirley Franklin’s first and second campaigns. Following her election in November 2001, Mayor Franklin selected him to serve as one of two Co-Chairs for the Shirley Franklin Transition Team.

Mayor-Elect Reed’s civic leadership and service has been nationally recognized in publications such as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Ebony and Black Enterprise. He was selected as one of Georgia Trend magazine’s “40 under 40 Rising Stars” in 2001, as one of the Fulton County Daily Report ’s “Lawyers on the Rise” and as one of “10 Outstanding Atlantans” in Outstanding Atlanta. Mayor-Elect Reed is a member of the Leadership Georgia Class of 2000 and is a Board Member of the Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund.

Mayor-Elect Kasim Reed is a member of Cascade United Methodist Church, pastored by Reverend Marvin Moss.