Debate flies over U.S. black lawyers

NEW YORK, Nov. 29 (UPI) -- Debate is flying throughout the U.S. legal community about a study of how black lawyers are being readily hired but not attaining partner status.

The issue came to a head in July, when Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, published a study in The North Carolina Law Review in which he said elite law firms mostly hire minority lawyers with much lower grades than white ones, the New York Times reported Wednesday.

Sander also found black lawyers are about one-fourth as likely to make partner as white lawyers from the same new class of associates.

"Black and Hispanic attrition at corporate firms is devastatingly high, with blacks from their first year onwards leaving firms at two to three times the rate of whites," he wrote.

However, Bruce McClean, chairman of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, wrote in an opinion article in The National Law Journal this month he didn't like the study's "sweeping conclusions, the Times said.

Another critic, Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, which opposes hiring preferences based on race, said hiring on a "double standard" compromises client confidence.

"It actually reinforces stereotypes," Clegg said.