Biglaw

After Taking Heat Last Year, Paul Weiss Spent 2019 Providing Firms A Blueprint For Improving Diversity

It's time to put a little more heat on the rest of Biglaw to be a little more like Paul Weiss.

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When talking heads complain about “political correctness” and how “it’s impossible not to offend these people,” they’re kind of missing the whole point. Doing right by folks is not a quest for perfection, but a willingness to embrace shortcomings and to take action to get it right. In other words, don’t get defensive, get proactive.

Last year, Paul Weiss announced a new partnership class that might well have raised no eyebrows except that it came with a picture worth several thousand words and those words weren’t particularly positive. The partnership welcoming portrait showed a gaggle of white men followed (alphabetically, but that didn’t help the optics) by a lone white woman. Paul Weiss employees flooded our inbox with the image and, as we explained at the time, the fact that the image didn’t set off any red flags before released summed up the problem with Biglaw writ large: it’s not the lack of diversity as much as the inability to notice the lack of diversity as out of the ordinary.

When called out for this, many firms would double down or try to just weather the bad press and carry on. Paul Weiss took the opposite course.

The firm quickly held a town hall to hear from the concerned attorneys and explain plans to address diversity concerns. Over the course of the year, the firm took the initiative to add diversity through the lateral market, landing former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Supreme Court litigator Kannon Shanmugam. The rest of the lateral class for the year: Jeannie Rhee, Sarah Stasny, Jean McLoughlin, Andrew Finch, and Laura Turano brought more diversity to the ranks and the incoming class, announced today, adds even more women. From a memo released this afternoon:

Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP is pleased to announce that seven attorneys have been elected to the partnership, effective January 1, 2020: Jonathan H. Ashtor, Rachael G. Coffey, Alexia D. Korberg, Caith Kushner, Kyle T. Seifried, Brette Tannenbaum and Austin Witt. All are resident in the New York office.

When Paul Weiss got publicly called out over this last year, we noted that there was some sense of karmic injustice to it. After all, other peer firms had atrocious diversity records but were flying under the radar simply because they didn’t put their classes in a picture.

On the other hand, maybe karma did right by the industry here. There aren’t many firms that could have stumbled like this and then turned around to provide a blueprint to the whole profession of how to make amends.

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Diversity isn’t something that gets “solved.” That’s sometimes difficult for results-minded professionals to accept, but diversity is always a process of striving to get better. Paul Weiss spent 2019 showing that it took 2018 seriously and understands that there’s always more to be done. It knows it’s not perfect, because perfection is an empty concept invoked to engender complacency. But the firm’s going to adhere to a strategy of promoting diversity in its partnership whenever and wherever it can.

And that’s what it means to be proactive.

Earlier: Paul Weiss Press Release Captures Everything Broken About Biglaw In One Image
If A Biglaw Firm Falls In The Woods And No One Issues A Press Release About Its Lack Of Diversity…

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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