Accounting firm Accenture sends its outside counsel a seven-page questionnaire asking them to compile “the number of ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, and women at the entire firm, on management committees, among student and lateral recruits, and among those attorneys working on Accenture matters.” Firms that refuse to fill out the questionnaire or fail to reduce the percentage of white straight male attorneys working for them from year to year are fired, even if their work is satisfactory. Again, the press coverage is entirely laudatory, without questioning whether it should be at all appropriate to judge attorneys by skin color and quotas. It’s also poorly edited: a “Stern” is quoted several times without identification. (Aruna Viswanatha, “On Diversity, It’s Shape Up, or Ship Out”, Corporate Counsel, Jan. 9). Earlier: Dec. 27.
Clients who care about the color of their attorneys II
Accounting firm Accenture sends its outside counsel a seven-page questionnaire asking them to compile “the number of ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, and women at the entire firm, on management committees, among student and lateral recruits, and among those attorneys working on Accenture matters.” Firms that refuse to fill out the questionnaire or fail to […]
3 Comments
The obvious thing to do when confronted with a bogus questionnaire like that : give out bogus data.
No point in actually doing any research, tell them what they want to hear. It’s not as if you’re perjuring yourself.
Then go and practise a non-discriminatory HR policy without interference from outside interests who are clueless.
Well, the local casino is run by a man who is 1/118 native American. So, i guess most of us should qualify for something other than the automatically guilty and privileged white male American.
I guess the fact that no one in my family, other than myself, has ever pursued a graduate degree and only my mother has a 4 year degree matters in this world of color, does it?
I’m also left agape by the fawning coverage in stories like this… not ONE critical comment?
I just attended a Washington, D.C. Bar Association ethics seminar (mandatory) in which it was communicated that, yes, clients are free to choose their attorneys on the basis of sex (hypothetical client didn’t want a female attorney). Race wasn’t mentioned. But this obviously creates a massive contradiction: it’s illegal for Law Firm X to say, “we won’t hire you because you’re white,” but the client is putting them in just such a position. And the would-be white associate now has no legal remedy. I would be willing to bet the Mega Millions jackpot that if any other race were the target, someone would file a lawsuit alleging SOMETHING… say, that the client must be deemed “an employer” for the purposes of civil rights laws. And I’ll further bet that a court would set aside the obvious distinction between client and employer and “reach the result,” as they say in law school. Far nuttier things have happened when American jurisprudence attempts to reconcile the competing messages on race.
One solution would be to eliminate anti-discrimination laws altogether, at least as they apply to private parties. There is no legitimate Constitutional authority for federal anti-discrimination laws in any event: the commerce clause justification is a laughable pretext.