ulian S. Brown, president of development at legal staffing company Compliance
Inc., in Arlington, Virginia, recently checked up on a job that called for five
lawyers to work on a temporary assignment. Four of them, it turned out, were African-American.
"That’s not rare," Brown says. "It turns out that there are
a higher percentage of minority attorneys who are temping. Typically, on one of
our projects, we will have 30 percent who are African-American."
The rate of participation by African-American lawyers in temporary
jobs at Compliance Inc. is the opposite of the situation at most large law firms
in the U.S., where only a fraction of the jobs are held by African-Americans. Brown
says Compliance Inc., which is owned by international staffing company Vedior, has
made no special effort to recruit African-American lawyers. Rather, he believes
the situation at Compliance is indicative of a broader trend in which African-American
lawyers, for various reasons, opt to work for temporary staffing agencies instead
of at law firms.
"I would argue that it is not going well at law firms [for
African-Americans], or else they are not getting opportunities at law firms," Brown
says.
While some temporary staffing firms say they also have noticed
higher participation by African-American lawyers than might be expected, others
say they have either not noticed the trend or else haven’t studied the ethnic makeup
of their contract workers. The American Staffing Association, which conducts research
on the contingent labor workforce, says it does not collect statistics on participation
by African-American lawyers.
But Brown and other staffing professionals say that they are
convinced that African-Americans and other minorities are clearly over-represented
in the temporary legal staffing field.
Nancy Molloy, president of legal staffing company Legend Global
Search Inc. in New York, says that more than 40 percent of her contract lawyers
are African-American and minorities overall account for more than 60 percent of
her contingent workforce. While she hires some African-American attorneys for temporary
placement straight out of college, many more arrive after leaving jobs at law firms.
"There is a high turnover of African-American attorneys at
law firms," Molloy says. "I think what happens is, there is no mentoring. There
is just a very small percentage of partners of color."
In its 2006 survey of the private law firm workforce, the
National Association for Legal Career Professionals surveyed more than 1,500 law
offices around the country. Of more than 60,000 partners at those firms, only 1.5
percent were African-American. Of about 60,000 associates at those firms, 4.5 percent
were African-American.
A separate study by NALP found that African-American lawyers
leave jobs at law firms at a much higher rate than others. While the overall attrition
rate for associates was 43 percent, it was 68 percent for African-American men and
64 percent for African-American women.
"African-Americans don’t last as long at law firms," Brown
says. "In terms of going from associate to partner, there are very few who make
it."
Leon Spencer, an African-American lawyer from South Carolina,
says he stumbled upon contingent legal work after leaving a job a few years ago
with a law firm in Columbia, South Carolina. He moved to Washington in hopes of
landing a job with a nonprofit or public interest group. To make ends meet, he took
a temporary assignment with Compliance Inc.
"It was steady income and I could start paying down my student
loans," Spencer says. He never left. Today he is a staffing director at Compliance.
Workforce Management Online, September 2007 --
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