Karen Munoz – Associate Attorney
I am the incoming vice director of the American Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Division Diversity Team. Over the past few weeks, I’ve started planning ahead for the 2013-2014 year, which kicks off this weekend at the ABA Annual meeting.
Judging by last year, when I headed the YLD’s Minorities in the Profession Committee, the time will come and go in an instant.
This next year, I hope our team puts in motion many diversity pipeline projects which the profession is in crucial need of, and which will benefit law firms and future lawyers for many years to come.
Sitting down to put to paper what the team hopes to accomplish, I began to ponder the importance of diversity in my life. I went back to the beginning, before I went to law school and before I even had an inkling that the law was what I would be living in later years to come.
To briefly explain, my parents came from Mexico many years ago. They became citizens of this country back when doing so wasn’t such a divisive issue.
I am a native Chicagoan and the first born of three girls. I am also a product of the Chicago public school system, which is where I can first pinpoint where diversity first realized itself in my life.
I was lucky enough to go to a grammar school which, in reality, had three schools within it.
One was the neighborhood program for the kids who lived in the neighborhood (that was me), the gifted kids (kids from all over the city who were really smart) and the hearing-impaired program.
I met so many kids with all sorts of backgrounds, life stories and ethnicities. The economic and social rungs ran the gamut.
I didn’t see it then, but I realized it later in life as that environment became replicated in a larger way at high school and the University of Illinois at Chicago. At UIC, there were students from all over the world.
Never having lived anywhere but Chicago, these relationships really opened my eyes to different cultures, politics, and religion — straight from the source. I learned where to get the best Indian food here and why Chicago-style pizza really isn’t what pizza is like in Italy.
By the time I got to law school, I expected to and was really looking forward to meeting new people from all different walks of life. It was not what I expected. The classes and the students were not from as diverse of backgrounds as I had grown accustomed to.
This trend continued once I began to practice, as well. One of the reasons I became involved with the ABA YLD was to help do what I can to make sure our profession continues to strive for diversity.
Knowing, meeting and, most importantly, listening to people’s stories does wonders not only for our legal practice, but also for our own human understanding.
As lawyers, we are advocates for our clients. To do the finest job as an advocate, we must do our best to empathize, place ourselves in the shoes of our client, and understand where they are coming from.
This can become increasingly difficult if you have little to no understanding of the framework you are working under and of the client’s background.
And trust develops from a mutual understanding by both the lawyer and client. You can’t hope to obtain your client’s trust without a mutual respect and an unspoken understanding that you do know where they are coming from.
To put into context, the recent statistics reveal the following:
The number of black and Mexican-American students applying to law school has seen very slight growth in the past two decades.
From 2003 to 2008, 61 percent of black applicants and 46 percent of Mexican-American applicants were denied acceptance at all of the law schools to which they applied. Problematic for diversity, these figures compare with only 34 percent of white applicants who suffered the same fate.
A study conducted by Columbia Law School that compared the situation in 1993 to 2008 found that the number of black students enrolled in law school fell from 7.9 percent to 7.3 percent and the number of Mexican-American students fell from 1.6 percent to 1.4 percent.
While the American population continues to evolve and become more and more diverse, those who practice the law belong to a predominantly white community.
This raises issues when individuals from ethnic minorities are at the hands of the law.
They may resent judgments made against them and might be forced to seek representation from lawyers who cannot relate to them.
If any readers have any ideas on how our diversity team can implement programs or other outreach initiatives in the profession, we are all ears.
At the end of the day, a diverse legal profession is in the best interest of every citizen.
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