Non-profit launches fund for women of colour law students

The  Diverse Attorney Pipeline Program (DAPP), a Chicago-based non-profit, is launching a fund and fellowship programme to support women of colour law students amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The DAPP Displaced Student Stipend Fund will provide financial support and intensive professional development for women of colour who have lost their 2020 law firm or corporate internship as a result of the outbreak.

“As an organisation, our whole mission has been focused on advancing the careers of underrepresented women of colour in the legal profession,” said DAPP co-founder Tiffany Harper. “Our goal is to address the lack of diversity in Big Law by infusing the pipeline with highly qualified, diverse law students who have undergone intensive training and professional development.”

Through the fund, displaced law students will undertake volunteer legal work during the summer of 2020.

And, in addition to the stipend, awardees will receive a DAPP Fellowship that matches students with lawyer mentors, provides professional development sessions and coaching and assists students in preparing their resumes and writing samples for future on-campus recruiting interviews.

Awardees will also complete research and writing assignments for nonprofit organisations in need of legal support.

DAPP co-founder Chasity Boyce added: “We know this is the critical moment in a law student’s career to gain access to the most prestigious positions in the profession. Students who work in law firms following their first year of law school are more likely to obtain summer associate positions and secure offers of employment following law school.”

DAPP established the fund with $20,000 of seed money from its own funds earmarked to support the pipeline of women of colour lawyers. It is  aiming to raise at least $100,000 for the fund.

Over the past few months, WIPR has reported on law firms and organisations raising the alarm, through partnerships and open letters, over the fact that diversity and inclusion (D&I) should not be forgotten during and in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Legal services provider Obelisk, in a report  published in April, concluded in-house teams must drive diversity if they are to recover and find new opportunities in a post-pandemic world.

Last month, we  reported that Seyfarth Shaw had partnered with a coalition of organisations committed to promoting D&I to combat the effects of the pandemic on D&I in the legal profession.

Seyfarth’s ‘The Belonging Project’ cites data from the National Association of Law Placement, which reported that the percentage of black attorneys at law firms in the US took a full decade to recover after falling after the Great Recession in the late 2000s.

In 2019, black attorneys  accounted for 4.76% of all associates, the highest level since reaching 4.66% in 2009.

Later in May, we  covered an open letter from the founder of a London legal services company, who fears that the COVID-19 pandemic could leave behind a “less diverse, less vibrant market and that will be to the detriment of everyone working in the legal profession”.

Harper and Boyce of the DAPP are both African American women who graduated from law school at the height of the previous recession.

“This is not a time to give up on D&I efforts; it’s a time to refocus our efforts on preparing the next generation of lawyers for the challenges they’ll face in a diverse, global marketplace,” said Boyce.

Harper added that, as law firms and businesses are forced to cut their summer internship programmes, the DAPP hopes they’ll consider contributing to this fund to support the programme’s work in “infusing the pipeline to the legal profession with talented, highly qualified women of color in order to address the dismal statistics surrounding the number of women of color who are hired, retained and promoted at large law firms across the nation”.

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