How 2 Firms Took Action on Equality After Floyd’s Murder
After the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman last year, many major law firms issued statements of outrage, joined coalitions and signed joint letters.
[…]
At Blank Rome, Aiming to Build ‘a Movement, Not Just a Moment’
Lawyers at Philadelphia-based Blank Rome are fond of saying that diversity and inclusion are part of their DNA, so it was no surprise that the firm redoubled its efforts over the past year since the Floyd murder.
Managing partner Grant Palmer explained in an interview that the firm was founded in 1946 by two Jewish lawyers who could not get hired at any other law firm in the city due to religious discrimination at the time.
As the law firm grew more successful — it's now an Am Law 100 firm with 14 offices and more than 600 attorneys across the U.S. and around the world — one of the founders went on to convince many other Philadelphia firms over time to drop their discriminatory hiring practices.
“Diversity and inclusion resonates more deeply with us because it is part of our heritage,” Palmer said.
Partner Sophia Lee put it another way.
“This is a movement, not just a moment,” Lee said. “We are in it for the long haul.”
[…]
Lee said that immediately following Floyd’s death, the law firm brought in Stephanie Jones to speak at a town hall for the entire firm. Jones’ father, the late Nathaniel Jones, had been a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati, a civil rights lawyer and general counsel of the NAACP, and a senior counsel with Blank Rome. He was named the law firm’s first chief diversity officer in 2004.
The federal courthouse in his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, is named for Jones, as is the University of Cincinnati's Center for Race, Gender, and Social Justice.
Palmer recalled that Stephanie Jones, an attorney herself, gave a moving speech about her father’s life that brought “a lot of people, including me, to tears.”
She said, “If he were still with us, he would tell us that you know the right thing to do. So just do it,” Palmer recounted.
“I think that speech had a great impact on the law firm as we went forward,” he said. “We started what we call open conversations, and the first one [a week after the Jones speech] was attended by 550 people. We talked about the events going on in the country, about allyship and how to support one another.”
From there, momentum took over.
To read the full article, please click here.
“How 2 Firms Took Action on Equality After Floyd’s Murder,” by Sue Reisinger was published in Law360 on May 25, 2021.