BusinessReport.com

Law firms, especially large ones, are feeling pressure to become more diverse in terms of minority hires, though they’re finding it easier said than done.

Bigger firms, particularly, are finding it in their best interest to recruit more minorities. Those firms tend to service extremely large clients—the Chevrons, the Dow Chemicals, even the Shaw Groups—and these corporate jumbos have super-sized diversity as a priority. They’ve already taken the diversity pledge, so to speak, and insist firms they hire do the same. More and more, these large clients are demanding proof of results.

It’s hard to argue that making the professional work force more closely resemble the face of society is anything but positive, and progress is being made. All the same, local law firms serious about raising the ranks of minority hires face tough recruiting competition from legal leviathans in big markets like Atlanta, Dallas and Houston, not to mention Chicago and New York.

“We have a burning desire to be diverse,” says Linda Perez Clark, a partner with Kean, Miller, Hawthorne, D’Armond, McCowan & Jarman. “The problem is we struggle to find the candidates. There is such competition to recruit minority graduates out of law school.”

Kean Miller is Baton Rouge’s largest firm, with competitive pay packages and a tradition of luring the best and brightest. Still, the firm is “struggling to get as diverse as we’d like to be,” Clark says.

She researched the problem and found minority enrollment in law schools is declining across the United States. One reason is a minority student with a bachelor’s degree has no shortage of employment opportunities. Diversity, meanwhile, has become a front-burner issue for so many companies. A minority graduate with a business degree and several job offers might think twice about spending three more years in law school, especially if it’s not necessary to get a good job.

That leaves law firms’ diversity pipelines with merely a trickle. Clark discovered a pre-law program for minorities at St. John’s University in New York. Kean Miller used it as a model for the Kean Miller Connection, a two-day law school prep course for minority college students.

The first one was held in May, with 17 student participants. It will be an annual event, says Clark, who runs the show. It’s about showing college kids what a career in law entails and assuring them that it is something they can do.

“If they do go to law school, we have a very good chance of landing them as summer clerks,” Clark says.

And who knows? That summer clerk could wind up at Kean Miller as a seasoned practicing attorney one day.

Maureen Harbourt, a partner with Kean Miller who chairs the firm’s Diversity Council, which promotes diversity from inside the organization, says Kean Miller also recruits aggressively from Louisiana’s four law schools: LSU, Southern, Tulane and Loyola. Kean Miller also attends minority job fairs in Dallas and Atlanta, including the important Sun Belt Minority Recruitment Program held each fall in Dallas.

For years, Kean Miller has tried to emphasize diversity at all levels—staff and paralegals as well as attorneys, Harbourt says.

“We’ve always had our hearts in right place, but it hasn’t always been as organized an effort,” she says.

David Miceli, a managing partner with Breazeale, Sachse & Wilson, says it’s been about eight years since he got his first diversity request from a large client.

“It was not a common thing,” he says. “But every single request for proposals we’ve participated in since has included requests for statistics about diversity.”

It’s especially prevalent “at the very top of the food chain,” Miceli says. Not only do big clients want to know about things like depth, experience and financial plan, now every RFP asks for details about diversity—not just how many minorities does the firm employ but how many are in leadership positions? How many are partners? How many minorities will be working on our particular matter?

Miceli suspects those companies have come to the conclusion that a diversity of perspective serves their own organizations well, thus they demand it from the firms they hire. And it’s not easy—especially in Louisiana, where it can be tough to attract and retain the right people regardless of race or gender, Miceli says. Add to that the fact law, as a profession, doesn’t have quite the cachet it once did.

“Our profession is not necessarily as attractive as it may have been perceived in the past,” he says. “It’s a lot of hard work, with a lot of high expectations.”

Still, a mandate is a mandate, so BSW presses ahead with its diversity strategy, which doesn’t necessarily mean hiring minorities their first year out of law school but rather establishing and maintaining relationships. A sizeable portion of Louisiana’s law grads, minorities included, head straight for the bright lights and giant paychecks of cities like Dallas, Houston and Atlanta, where firms are under the same pressure to diversify but pay more.

For some of those young lawyers, the extreme pace wears thin after a while. Marriage. Children. Thoughts turn to home. It’s those who, having left Louisiana four or six years earlier, Miceli hopes to catch on the rebound. Not only do you get an experienced lawyer that way, you get somebody who wants to be here, he says. The top 250 firms in the country have attrition rates of well over 50%, Miceli says.

“You get a lot of folks who want to come home,” he says. “I just think there’s an opportunity to add both experience and diversity to your law firm when you maintain that approach.”

Miceli says BSW isn’t where it wants to be in terms of diversity, though the firm has committed itself, recognizing that it’ll strengthen BSW’s capacity for serving clients.

Freddie Pitcher, chancellor of the Southern University Law Center, agrees that fewer minority students are applying to law schools around the country in large part because they can get good jobs with just a bachelor’s degree. Southern’s law school applicant pool peaked at 1,400 right before Hurricane Katrina, which knocked it through the floor. It’s back up to around 900. Pitcher says he doesn’t know if it’ll ever reach pre-storm levels. It’s also true that Louisiana’s pool of law school applicants—Caucasian as well as African-American—is pretty thin.

Still, there’s plenty of interest in the law as a career among minority students, says Pitcher, a retired judge who spent six years as a partner at Phelps Dunbar before becoming law chancellor at Southern. The law center just held its annual pre-law program, which attracts students from across the state and even Texas.

Pitcher guesses about half his top 20 grads take jobs out of state each year and the other half stay in Louisiana. Three of his grads were just hired by Sidley Austin in New York, starting at $160,000 a year. The Chicago office employs several more. All told, about 15 Southern law grads work for Sidley Austin, which has more than 1,800 lawyers worldwide.

Pitcher says the firm is good about mentoring its young minority hires, teaching them how to cultivate a clientele and bringing in business. Otherwise they’ll languish, fail to make partner and part ways—leaving behind a firm with a weaker diversity profile by one.

“Mentoring is key,” Pitcher says. “I know it doesn’t happen as much as it should: ‘If you want to make it in this firm, here are some of the things you’re going to have to do.’”

This is certain: It’s a good time to be a minority law grad at the top of one’s class. Pitcher’s advice to students is simple: study.

“When a freshman class comes in, I tell them if you apply yourself you can go from Southern to anywhere you want to go,” he says. “Big law firms, medium-size firms, clerkships—it’s all within your reach.”

Eric Eden, director of admissions for LSU’s Hebert Law Center, says the school is pushing several efforts to boost the number of minority applicants, including working with minority student organizations [including but not limited to black student groups], extending career outreach to high school and even middle school students and working with the national Law School Admissions Council and its standing diversity committee.

Eden says the decrease in minority applicants is embedded within an overall drop in law school admissions regionally and nationwide. Figuring out why, he says, “is the $64,000 question.” LSU law applications for the year ending August 2007 were 1,299, well below the pre-Katrina peak of 1,682.

“Some think it’s linked to demographics,” Eden says. “When the economy is soft people tend to look for a professional degree to wait it out. That doesn’t really explain what’s happening now.”