The Struggle of the Internal Lawyer Recruiter

Recently, there has been a nationwide effort to identify and hire diverse legal talent. The impetus for this is manifold. Many businesses, especially law firms and corporate legal departments have undertaken this endeavor to broaden their legal personnel rosters, with the goal of enhancing their abilities to provide well-informed legal services by drawing on the combined experiences of legal professionals from multiple backgrounds. Equally, there has been a drive by major corporations and other business entities to ensure that outside counsel handling the company’s business matches the composition of either the corporation’s legal departments or its customer base or both. These and other motivations have led to the reaching out for diverse legal talent in a scope likely not ever seen in the legal world.

The goal of hiring more minority lawyers and women lawyers has proven a bit daunting. Why?

For various historical reasons, the population of diverse lawyers in the United States is a relatively small one. Racial discrimination has played a part in this. Attempts to right the discrimination in law school admissions have had a mixed effect, with some court decisions facilitating minority enrollment on the one hand and other rulings hampering it. The resulting effect has been to keep the numbers of applying minority students, other than women, at a flat and low rate. The consequence of that, among other factors, is that there are few or fewer law school graduates who are minorities. Naturally, the consequence of that is that as law firm recruiting decision-makers begin to try to recruit diverse attorneys, the pool itself is a smaller one than they may have believed at the outset of their search.

One typical scenario is where a recruiting coordinator has been given the task of recruiting lateral hires who are minority lawyers. In that case, the coordinator takes one or more of the standard paths: recruiting by internal referral; recruiting by external means (seeking external referrals, for example, or by posting on job boards or in classified ads); or availing themselves of third-party attorney search consultants.

All of these are necessary components to a search where the searching party hopes to recruit a minority lawyer. Essentially, however, other than undertaking a search in hand with an attorney search consultant, the pool of attorneys who are available tends to be smaller than anticipated by the recruiting coordinator. And, as with all other candidates in the pool, when the law firms limit their search to certain law school tier and gpa requirements, that number shrinks further. Add to this the factor that there are multiple employers seeking diverse lateral hires, and it inevitably leads to the frustration that a firm, although well meaning, simply cannot find the talent it needs.

What to do?

The best approach is the broadest approach. That is, the typical search listed above, using internal, external and recruiting firms, must broaden in breadth and time. A firm must have a multi-pronged tactic not only to identify the available talent, but also to make it known that it actively seeks to make diverse attorneys a meaningful part of its program and that it is willing to forego previous parameters in recruiting among the broadest pool of candidates possible. Below is a guide to enhancing the search for qualified diverse personnel:

1. Make the law firm/legal department populace aware that the firm is actively recruiting attorneys of all backgrounds.
   
2. Be sure that the local, regional and national audience that comprises the pool of recruits is aware that the firm has that as a goal.
   
3. Be aware of local, regional and national affinity groups, particularly those that count significant numbers of minority attorneys among their membership.
   
4. Also be cognizant of law school, college and high school groups that count as
   a part of their membership significant numbers of minority attorneys-to-be.
   
5. Utilize the services of third-party search firms such as Special Counsel to identify passive minority candidates and to take advantage of their relationships with the groups listed in 3 and 4 above.
   
6. Engage contract personnel as often as possible, with a significant number of diverse candidates, and expose them to the benefits of working with your firm, and simultaneously give yourself the opportunity to experience their work.
   
7. Provide contract personnel with work that they may be expected to do on behalf of clients that seek involvement from a broader group in its representation.

Recruiting attorneys can be a frustrating process, but a conscious effort to broaden the search across untapped resources can assist in the discovery of previously unrecruited attorneys.