Conley on Racial Equity in Private Firms

Posted by Jeff Lipshaw

One of the wonderfully rewarding aspects about jumping into academia after so long in the practice is to realize that part of the job description of professional teacher is (or should be) to be a professional learner.  (That we are professional learners even in business was part of my management philosophy, so perhaps that says something, but I don’t know quite what.)

That’s an introduction to my recommendation of a tremendously interesting article, methodologically and substantively, by John Conley (North Carolina, left), who I featured in a post yesterday.  The article is “Tales of Diversity:  What Lawyers Say About Racial Equity in Private Firms,” 31 Law & Social Inquiry 831 (2006).  Professor Conley is an anthropologist and law professor, so the first part of the paper is an explanation of the scholarly discipline of ethnographic narrative – what you can learn and just how much you can generalize from what people say about their culture – in this case, lawyers about their jobs and their firms.  The second part is a report on what lawyers in different kinds of firms actually say about racial diversity.  The abstract follows below the fold, but as Larry Solum would say: download it while it’s hot!

Here is the abstract:

This paper reports on what a narrativestudy of the legal profession has revealed about diversity in privatelaw firms. Since 1995 I have taught a course about the legal professionthat revolves around interviews with lawyers representing the breadthof the legal profession. Over nine iterations, I have completed over100 such interviews. They have yielded narratives on such topics as howvarious kinds of practice groups work, how legal careers evolve, howlawyers’ professional and personal lives interact, how lawyers feelabout their profession, and what they believe are their most difficultmoral and ethical challenges. The topic of diversity in variouspractice settings has also figured prominently in most of theinterviews. All of the lawyers interviewed have expressed enthusiasmfor diversity as a value to be pursued. However, almost withoutexception, private-firm lawyers have admitted that their respectiveorganizations have made unsatisfactory progress. When asked to analyzetheir firm’s performance, most provide explanations that do not augurwell for the diversification of the private bar in the near future.Their narratives implicate as causal factors the history of individualfirms, the nature of intimate business associations, the profession’sdominant hiring and promotion models, and, in most cases, the absenceof external pressures to diversify