Biglaw

Biglaw Firm Accused Of Maintaining A 'Black List' Of Minorities To Push Out Was Actually Predicting Departures Of All Sorts Of Associates

List maintained by one professional development person is now kind of embarrassing the whole firm.

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Last week, a post popped up on Top Law Schools accusing Debevoise & Plimpton of what would have to be the dumbest form of racism you could hope to see out of a Biglaw firm.

I just wrapped up my summer at Debevoise and things started out great. But unlike other SAs, I guess I was really focused on trying to use the summer to find out if Debevoise was the right place for me. I used the summer lunches to ask questions and also reached out to folks in the diversity group. I really felt like folks were candid about alot of things except one area — race. There is a clear difference in the experience the black associates get at Debevoise in contrast to white associates. And I don’t mean “oh there’s only a handful of us so we’re underrepresented”. I mean a clear difference in work, opportunities for growth, firm committee involvement, & even speaking opportunities… I didn’t hear any bad things about Debevoise before. Except this thread makes me now realize perhaps the firm and the online platforms it sponsors, help to avoid bad news by quieting any dissenting remarks…

This thread was locked but its actually an off-brand reference to the Debevoise Black List, which ACTUALLY EXISTS. So the Debevoise Black List (DBL) was some Excel chart that was created, which basically charts target termination/departure dates for black associates at the firm, BEFORE any of these individuals had even said they were interested in leaving. The list definitely exists. An associate shared it with me a few weeks ago and it threw me into a tailspin. How did this not get out? Well it kind of did if you consider the thread above. But here’s the backstory of how Debevoise squashed the news from getting out? This was confirmed by several associates (black and white): The firm’s managing partner asked/forced all the black associates to meet in a conference room so he could explain away the list and the rationale behind it, despite the clear-as-day references on the chart. The associates could really do nothing. But that didn’t help things or stop Debevoise apparently because they still forced out many associates according to the schedule on the DBL. Seriously. Starting this Monday, Debevoise will not have any black senior associates either in their corporate or litigation groups. That was according to the DBL timeline. The last remaining senior associate, in corporate, leaves tomorrow and by most accounts, he was forced out. It was really demoralizing to read the news of the associate’s upcoming departure since it feels like confirmation of what I feared — Debevoise brings in black associates for the numbers but then gradually forces them out by not giving them good work or simply asking them to leave.

Now, FULL DISCLOSURE: I was an associate at Debevoise & Plimpton, a long time ago, and my personal experiences do not track with the original post. I felt I received a fair combination of “good” work and “I would stab out my eyes to avoid this work, but they’d probably just make me learn braille instead of putting me on disability” work. Certainly, there was no white colleague in my class year who I thought was getting a materially better deal than I was, especially because somewhere north of 2400 hours, every additional piece of work just made me want to vomit anyway.

So, I’m biased. But I’m also biased because maintaining a “black list” of minority associates would be colossally stupid. Nobody I met at Debevoise was such a drooling idiot that they’d… write down a timeline for when to push minority associates out of the firm. I mean, damn. That just doesn’t pass the smell test of something a major law firm would do in 2018.

We reached out to Michael Blair, the managing partner at Debevoise & Plimption. Blair acknowledged the existence of a “list,” but not of the kind contemplated by the poster.

He said that a single person in professional development created a list, on her own accord, to “organize her thoughts” on associate headcount and associate attrition for recruiting purposes. Her list helped her think through how many summers or 3Ls or clerks or laterals would need to be hired. This list contained no racial classifications, but did list, by name, associates in the department she was responsible for. The list was organized into different categories of potential associate departures. Some were obvious, like associates who would be transferring to other offices.

But some of the categories were predictive: her list included her own predictions of who would be asked to leave the firm due to performance issues.

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Blair emphasized that those predictions about who would make partner and who would be asked to leave were “largely inaccurate.” He said that the list was never shared with any partner, and that he himself had not seen the list until 2017.

It’s not like the original poster here is making it up. He or she saw something that included the names of people, and their expected departures, made by a person involved in management. Moreover, Blair points out that the 2017 list did in fact have a disproportionaite number of African-American associates in the “performance issue” category, though most of those people were not in fact asked to leave because, again, Blair emphasized that the professional development person’s predictions were not all that reliable. Blair also said that in previous versions of the list, no African-American associates were listed as having performance issues.

So then you have to ask how did this, let’s call it personal spit-balling, from a professional development person make it all the way down into the hands of a summer associate? Blair says that when the firm changed its document management system, way back in 2014, some documents previously labeled “restricted” lost that designation. Blair became aware of the list in 2017 when he learned this document had its confidentiality breached as part of the systems changeover.

That means anybody, for years, could have played around in the system and seen one person’s predictions of who would be pushed out of the firm, without the context that this was a person with no authority to actually throw anybody overboard.

It’s not a good look and, at least in my opinion, Blair sounded suitably embarrassed by the whole thing.

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But the explanation does sound credible to me. As I’ve been kicking the tires on this story, I’ve heard from current and former associates of the firm who simply can’t believe that the alternative reading — that Debevoise is actually keeping a secret list of minority associates to fire — could possibly be true. Hell, I’ve heard from a white partner who said, “Come on, if we did this kind of thing I wouldn’t work here.”

Moreover, I’ve heard from people, both white and black, who are angry at the summer associate. I personally think the anger is misplaced; the student saw what they saw and if you see a bunch of black associates listed to be pushed out on a document that comes from a person who appears to be in a position of authority, what were they supposed to think? Trust me on this, the chance that a major law firm is secretly racist is waaaaay more likely than the chance that a major law firm hasn’t updated its document restrictions since 2014. So I don’t fault the kid as much as others.

Still, the word that kept coming back to me from Debevoise people was “demoralizing.” There’s a perception in the legal community that Debevoise is doing a good job, relatively speaking, with minority hiring and retention. This story has been a body blow to associates who felt like they had made the right choice.

Blair told me that his job now is to reassure those associates that Debevoise is as committed to minority hiring and retention now as it has been since he took over in 2012. He listed some stats from his tenure:

The percentage of our associates who are African-American has increased from 4.9 percent to 6.8 percent, which is a 39 percent increase. The percentage of our associates of color has increased from 22 percent to 36 percent. The percentage of our partners of color has increased from 6.2 percent to 12.8 percent. And 40 percent of our internal partnership promotions over the past twelve years have been women. We are working on this, and we have a long way to go… but we’re moving the needle in a significant way.

Blair said that he intends to address the issue of this “list” with the whole firm, later this week. “It ain’t easy, but people here have been running up the mountain.”

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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