Michael Oshima
Partner
Arnold & Porter has made diversity a firm-wide commitment. The firm’s Washington, D.C. office has won several Thomas L. Sager awards and was even named an Employer of Choice, but now the spotlight is also shared with Arnold & Porter’s New York office, which has made significant progress of its own.
The New York office of Arnold & Porter has numbers that really stand out. Minorities constitute 18.8 percent of all attorneys in its office, and 41 percent of their attorneys are women. Since 1999, there has been a 160 percent increase in the number of minority lawyers in its office, and this compares to only a 9.5 percent increase in attorneys overall during that same period.
Associate numbers have grown in particular with 21.4 percent of its New York associates as minorities and 57 percent as women. This year, the office will welcome a new associate class that is 50 percent women and 50 percent minorities. The 2003 summer associate class was the most diverse in which minorities represented two-thirds of the class – and this is where Arnold & Porter’s New York office will recruit a majority of their new associate hires for next year. This growth speaks volumes about the New York office’s commitment to diversifying its attorney ranks.
No greater, perhaps, is the office’s success with diversity illustrated than in the area of retention. While increasing their number of minority hires, the New York office has been able to retain their minority attorneys. In fact, not one minority attorney has left the firm since 1994. Given the high turnover rates experienced by most law firms, this is an amazing accomplishment, which speaks volumes about the talent of their minority lawyers as well as the work environment at Arnold & Porter.
The New York office’s efforts to create and maintain an inclusive work environment commands support from the very top. Minority and women partners, for example, perform in high profile, decision-making positions.
The office’s minority and women attorneys are involved in the recruitment of minority and women associates – interviews, call-back decisions, and are on the hiring committee. Women and minorities also attend on-campus recruiting opportunities to increase their firm’s recognition among minority student groups.
Flexible programs, such as emergency back-up childcare, maternity and parental leave policies, and part-time policies are available, allowing all associates to meet the demands of family and professional commitments.
The firm supports affinity groups in which informal mentoring between senior minority and women attorneys and junior associates can take place. The office also offers mandatory top-down diversity training in which every person who works at the firm must participate.
Arnold & Porter’s diversity success has been widely recognized in such sources as the Vault.com Guide to the Top 100 Law Firms, Working Mother, and Fortune. Diversity concerns Arnold & Porter and they work to stay on top of it, to be a part of it, and to strive to maintain it.
From the November/December 2003 issue of Diversity & The Bar®