2013 CLE EXPO SPECIAL FOLLOW-UP INTERVIEW
Action” where they made a commit- ment to try to encourage law firms to try to include more minorities and women in their pitch teams and billing partners and I think that corporate America gets it. Tey are saying “We have to answer to the public and if we have no women and no minorities in my corporation my sales are going to go down. I am not going to do business with a law firm that will not implement the same policies.” While law firms are lagging, I think in time they will too “get it,” and their clients are thankfully pushing that issue.
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Do you see corporations shift- ing work to NAMWOLF firms? I recently joined an organiza- tion—NAMWOLF—the National Association of Minority and Women Owned Law Firms—and I think that there’s a recognition by minor- ity lawyers, in this sense women and minorities, who tend to be lawyers from big firms who have left and established their own firms. Te cor- porations are now hiring the lawyers, and not the firms. I can tell you that in my specific instance, if a major matter came in and the corporation wanted my skills and reputation as part of their legal team they would hire me no matter where I was. Tey come to me now because I’m at Martin & Gitner. I think that there are enough
minority and women attorneys who have established reputations as fine lawyers that corporate America is saying to them we would like you, because of your skills, to be part of our legal team.
Can you talk about your transition from government prosecutor to private attorney? What about your transitions from firm to firm? Why did you decide to change? What was your favorite place to work? I have an easy answer. Te job I enjoyed the most as a lawyer was as an assistant United States attorney. I
DIVERSITY & THE BAR® MAY/JUNE 2013
had the opportunity to really feel I was making a difference in the community. I would investigate crime and I could prosecute those who had committed wrongs. I could make a difference by establishing programs to help young people. Instead of bringing them into the criminal justice system, we could have diversion programs. You could go into the community and keep young men, primarily young African American boys, from going into that prison pipeline. I think we made a difference
here in Washington and I think the programs are making a difference throughout the country. But for me, the job of a federal prosecutor was making a difference, either enforcing the law, or diverting the crime. Some of the people we have saved in the community... I enjoyed that. If you asked me other than being a prosecu- tor, what did I like? While I enjoyed being a partner, I really enjoy owning my own law firm.
Would you ever go back and work for the government? You know that’s an interesting ques- tion. I was recently asked if I was interested in rejoining the Department of Justice at a senior level and while I would be interested in that, right now I am building a business and business is going pretty well, and I would like to continue to build my business. While I would like to go back into government service, I think that that time has passed. What I am going to do for the reminder of my years of a practitioner is to build this system.
What are your thoughts on the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decisions? Specifically Fischer v. Univ. of T
exas and the reex-
amination of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I was a law student at the University of Cincinnati in the fall of 1973, after graduating from Howard University. While I attended
law school we dealt with the Washington state case of Marco DeFunis—who I believe was at the University of Washington. And I remember early on—the
so-called affirmative action cases—I have been following these cases and some of these, the DeFunis case I think was a lawsuit and they were of interest to me because I was then the president of BALSA—the Black American Law Student Association —and we were interested in them because we wanted more minorities in law school. It’s interesting when you look at
our laws, and some of the reverse discrimination cases. You can’t start at this point today without recognition there are hundreds of years—recently I went to the movies to watch Lincoln and after watching the blood that was spilled over the issue of slavery and the amendments to the Constitution to abolish slavery. You walk out and look at the history of race relations in the laws of America and we’re still catch- ing up to some of the harms that were done by those bad laws. When you look at the current
matters before the Supreme Court, whether or not the Voting Rights Act is, as implemented in the nine Southern states and the other states outside the South, and whether the Supreme Court will intervene to rule it constitutional, I might find it interesting on the Voting Rights Act that Congress in 2006 continued and reaffirmed it for 25 more years. Now the Supreme Court is stepping back in to reexamine that decision, for what has been argued is along pure political lines, and may be abolishing it. I can tell you now, as the current president of the Washington Bar Association, as well as the affiliate of the National Bar Association, in every jurisdiction we had attorneys at polling stations throughout America, and there were numerous complaints that either machines were not work- ing or people had to stand in line for hours. To disenfranchise any citizen
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