Civil Rights Complaint Targets 44 Major Law Firms Over Race-Based Hiring
Top law firms allegedly outsourced their discriminatory hiring practices to SEO, a nationwide staffing agency that favors Black, Hispanic, and Native American applicants
Over 40 of the nation’s largest law firms worked with an outside staffing agency to engage in an illegal, racially discriminatory internship program, according to an EEOC complaint filed last week by Americans for Equal Opportunity, a civil rights membership group.
The complaint charges both the agency and 44 participating law firms—including 18 top-tier firms already targeted by the Trump administration—over their DEI-related hiring, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
SEO’s Law Fellowship is the legal industry’s largest so-called “diversity pipeline” program, the civil rights group says. It provides summer law firm internships that can pay over $4,000 a week to nearly 200 incoming law students each year—i.e., “0L’s,” students who have not even started law school.
The self-described Fellowship program is more than just a summer job. It’s a leg up—for Black, Hispanic, and Native American candidates, the racial groups preferred by SEO and its partners, according to the complaint. The internship provides “0L’s” an “opportunity to experience daily life inside a prominent law firm the summer before law school begins,” placing each candidate “ahead of the curve” for future positions. In fact, most participants are invited to return the next summer, the complaint says. And many are fast-tracked to highly coveted full-time positions at top-tier firms paying a minimum of $220,000 per year.
Law firms have been facing calls to confront racial injustice for years, calls they could no longer ignore during the 2020 George Floyd protests. That summer, while politicians took a knee and corporate America proclaimed “Black Lives Matter,” “BigLaw” got in line and issued statements in support of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Over 70 of these “loyalty oaths” from the toniest law firms were duly recorded at the left-leaning Above the Law that year.
Statements alone, however, weren’t enough to satisfy BigLaw’s corporate clients. They wanted to see the receipts, the Wall Street Journal reported in November 2020: “Companies including Microsoft Corp., UBER and Intel Corp. are asking the law firms they hire to detail how many diverse lawyers they employ and whether those lawyers are assigned meaningful work. Firms that don’t have good answers might lose out on bonuses or not get hired.”
More recently, according to AEO’s complaint, law firm clients have required “extensive disclosure of demographic information, including the race and ethnicity of every lawyer staffed on the clients’ matters, as a condition for retaining a law firm. Some clients have gone so far as to request detailed information about Sponsor Firms’ compensation structures for counsel and partners —
including their race and ethnicity — and have pressured firms to align compensation credit with the clients’ demographic preferences.”
Some of the pressure to meet diversity hiring quotas comes from within the law firms themselves, the AEO complaint says. A number of firms offer financial incentives to partners who satisfy racial quotas. And several of the firms charged in the complaint report their progress to stakeholders, as, for example, the prestigious Cooley has done here.
All this hyperfocus on diverse working environments in the legal community inspired Vault, the career intelligence platform, to roll out a yearly ranking of the best law firms for diversity. Based on input from associates, each firm is assigned a score to show how they rate at “creating, maintaining, and fostering a diverse workforce.”
For law firms eager to make the cut, the SEO internship program provides a solution. SEO screened out applicants from disfavored races and ethnicities through its application process, the complaint alleges, including a questionnaire requiring disclosures of race, sexual orientation, and gender identity. The agency also used a workaround Professor Jacobson has written about here: an identity-based essay prompt inviting applicants to take the hint and disclose their race.
Simply put, according to the charge, the SEO program enabled these prestigious law firms to achieve what they couldn’t achieve by vetting candidates the old-fashioned way, based on merit: race-based hiring.
“These law firms have been discriminating in plain sight for years,” Ivey told Legal Insurrection in an email exchange. “Aside from their participation in SEO, many of these firms have operated “1L” summer programs, which in many cases bluntly stated racial preferences in hiring for preferred minorities. It is especially galling that the heavyweights in the legal industry have engaged in so much illegal hiring, because most of these firms have employment law practices with attorneys who are supposed to advise clients on how to comply with the Civil Rights Act.”
At first, SEO openly promoted its racial bias, only later to walk it back, then bury it altogether. As recently as 2019, Ivey says SEO described its law program as “targeting talented African American, Hispanic and Native American college students.” In 2020, the staffing agency advertised the Fellowship to prospective applicants as “the nation’s only summer internship program for pre-law students of color.” The next year, it touted its program as the only one “of its kind to offer talented, underrepresented, incoming law school students the opportunity to work at a top law firm during the summer before law school.” That language has since been removed entirely, and now “All are welcome to apply.”
Last week, SEO’s other social media accounts were also purged. On May 11, the day AEO filed its complaint, SEO Law’s official X.com account described the program as for “incoming law students from underrepresented backgrounds.” And the Director of SEO San Francisco, Omar Wandera, described SEO’s programs as “tailored for underrepresented minorities” on his LinkedIn page. Both the X account and LinkedIn were scrubbed shortly after AEO filed their complaint.
And now, at SEO’s website, the named partnership law firms—all 44 of them—are gone.
“AEO is totally unsurprised by the scramble to revise discriminatory language that SEO and the law firms have undertaken since our charge became public. This is part of a pattern of behavior to hide who they really want to hire,” Ivey says. “But everyone in the legal industry knows what they really mean: they only want applications from their preferred groups.”
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Comments
What are overeducated, underqualified “queens” gonna do now?
Do clients really want lawyers who are not top shelf?
For Dhimmi-crats/leftists– who dominate American and European corporate C-Suites and Boardrooms — competence of counsel is secondary to engaging in self-congratulatory virtue-signaling stunts and bloviating. That’s why almost all of major corporations release annual “DEI” and/or “climate change” reports — to show off how allegedly virtuous they are.
“Virtue” in this case meaning — naturally — slavish and dutiful adherence to Dhimmi-crats’/leftists’ environmental fanaticism and unlawful and racist “DEI” and “equity” hiring and contract awarding policies.
The VP gets a small benefit from the company doing well on his watch, where the “doing well” is a result of a dozen different VPs and his influence is marginal.
The same VP gets a medium benefit from being able to boast about boosting minority employment at cocktail parties, and whether or not he gets that benefit depends directly on whether or not he pressured the law firm to supply minority lawyers.
Owner operated firms no doubt want the best lawyer possible, but in today’s overregulated world the small owner operated firms are vastly outcompeted by the megafirms who can afford to keep track of all the myriad state and federal regulations and figure out which of the contradictory ones will get you in less trouble if broken.
That’s the real question, isn’t it? There are still law schools that base everything on how well you do rather than what color your skin happens to be. Their graduates will consistently outperform the DEI hires. What must happen in order for that to occur is for those law firms ignoring merit to be transparent about their hiring practices. Happily, they’re delusionally proud of it, so they don’t hide it.
Seems to me that private firms should be allowed to hire whomever they want to hire, for whatever reasons they choose.* That’s neither unethical nor unconstitutional, so long as they don’t accept federal funding—it’s private enterprise at its finest. Lying about it to, or concealing it from potential clients would be unethical.
* They might want to hire Tibetan yak farmers who happen to be interested in 15th century lesbian poetry as it pertained to the connection between Socrates’ death and the early writings of Sir Isaac Newton. As employers, they get to make that call.
Well put!!
DEI is such a grift.
SHUT IT DOWN.
Well put!!
too late
the courts have been over run by the rubber stamped affirmaction long ago
4000/week for prelawyers??? Be still my heart.
No. First-year salary after graduation.
When are the class action suits going to ramp up on Fortune 500 companies that did race based hiring and promotions. So many of us were hired the same time as POC only to see those with the right skin tones launched up the corporate ladder. One guy (my former skip level manager) went from the lowest hiring level for our profession and up 5-7 brackets to senior manager in 18 months doing next to nothing except going to school on company time. There are dozens like him. Meanwhile white counterparts absolutely holding the company together by a thread were given less than 2% raises and haven’t moved up a notch.
I WANT MY REPARATIONS!!!!!!
I was once awarded a portion of a class action lawsuit when big tech calluded to keep salaries down and blackballed hiring from each others ranks. Intel could not poach Apple Talent and vice versa. I forget who else was in on it. MSFT may have been, but they were so dirty they just did it anyway.