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Spotlighting F 14


A DIFFERENT DEAN Drucilla Stender Ramey


BY PATRICK FOLLIARD


Heading up a law school entails more than ceremony and fundraising. As dean of Golden Gate University School of Law in San Francisco since 2009, Drucilla Stender Ramey regularly goes “mano a mano” with the university administration to ensure that her students get what is owed them. “Law schools are typically a university’s cash cow. Without our fair share of the budget,” she says, “it would be impossible to have a quality program.”


DIVERSITY & THE BAR® MAY/JUNE 2012


ighting for what’s fair is a theme that threads through Ramey’s dynamic and enduring career. And whether that means push- ing to guarantee equal opportu- nities for women and minorities in the legal profession or providing legal counsel to


underrepresented clients, she wouldn’t have it any other way. For 17 years (1985-2002), Ramey served as execu- tive director and general counsel of the Bar Association of San Francisco (BASF). She describes her diversity eff orts with the organization as among the most satisfy- ing accomplishments of her career. “My theory was that you try almost anything you can think of to chip away at patterns of discrimination and economic inequality that have been centuries in the making. Fortunately, our board took, and still takes, a similarly committed position on the responsibilities of the organized bar to advance equality in the justice system. “In 1988,” says Ramey, “Dennis Archer, who at


the time was a Michigan Supreme Court justice and the most powerful African American member of the American Bar Association (he would later be elected ABA president), asked me to launch the fi rst statewide bar association minority counsel program to increase diversity in the profession. I was a little nervous—my corporate contacts weren’t too strong at the time—in fact, they included just one, Guy Rounsaville Jr., the longtime general counsel of Wells Fargo Bank, with whom I had recently had lunch.” Her fi rst move was to seek assistance from


Rounsaville. After some consideration, he concluded that he and his company would benefi t by diversify- ing both its legal department and outside counsel, and shortly thereafter joined Ramey in co-founding the California Minority Counsel Program (CMCP). Known and respected in the region, Rounsaville swiftly persuaded many of his fellow GCs from some of California’s largest corporations to join in lead- ing the new CMCP, paying the dues and pledging to increase racial and ethnic diversity in the lawyers they retained. “He also almost single-handedly brought dozens of major law fi rms into CMCP,” says Ramey, “by the simple expedient of impressing upon them, as a major client, his strong support for the program and his


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