Virginia Lawyers Weekly

The Virginia State Bar’s young lawyers group does much better in terms of minority participation than the bar itself.

Several members of the VSB Diversity Task force made that observation at the panel’s July 28 meeting. Minority involvement is relatively strong in the VSB’s Young Lawyers Conference, which generally covers attorneys age 36 and younger, but it dissipates as attorneys grow older.

Del. Jennifer L. McClellan, D-Richmond, the current president of the YLC and a member of the task force, said many young lawyers don’t know just what the bar does and have the idea the participation in VSB activities is largely for older lawyers.

The mid-30s timeline for switching from YLC to regular VSB membership comes at a crossroads in the professional and personal lives of many attorneys who must decide how much time to allocate to activities outside of their families and practices.

Much of that time goes to specialty, local and minority bar groups rather the VSB, which a Young Lawyers Conference Commission on Women and Minorities report found earlier this year to be “staid and unexciting” to many of its members with little to offer them.

The commission’s recommendations were circulated to the task force prior to the meeting. The commission suggested that the bar do a better job of publicizing the opportunities to become involved in the VSB and its leadership. It noted that the YLC Web site contains visible links to “Get Involved,” “How to Participate” and “Leadership” while the VSB Web site’s suggestions for participation are not as evident.

The perception of the bar as a white old boys’ club is reflected to a large degree in the makeup of the bar council, the VSB’s governing body, which has no black members elected to it by the lawyers in the judicial districts.

A recurring problem in discussions about the lack of diversity in the VSB is its policy of not identifying or categorizing members by ethnicity or gender. That makes it more difficult to identify the rising stars among minority lawyers and recruit them for VSB leadership, bar leaders have said.

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