African-American Lawyers Working as Temps in Law Firms Signals Possible Trend

Workforce Management
Recruiting and Staffing

High representation in contingent work may be indicative of a broader trend in which African-American lawyers, for various reasons, are opting to work for temporary staffing agencies instead of at law firms. Lack of opportunity could be a factor. By Irwin Speizer ulian S. Brown, president of development at legal staffing company Compliance Inc., in Arlington, Virginia, recently checked up on a job that called for five lawyers to work on a temporary assignment. Four of them, it turned out, were African-American.
"That’s not rare," Brown says. "It turns out that there are a higher percentage of minority attorneys who are temping. Typically, on one of our projects, we will have 30 percent who are African-American."
The rate of participation by African-American lawyers in temporary jobs at Compliance Inc. is the opposite of the situation at most large law firms in the U.S., where only a fraction of the jobs are held by African-Americans. Brown says Compliance Inc., which is owned by international staffing company Vedior, has made no special effort to recruit African-American lawyers. Rather, he believes the situation at Compliance is indicative of a broader trend in which African-American lawyers, for various reasons, opt to work for temporary staffing agencies instead of at law firms.
"I would argue that it is not going well at law firms [for African-Americans], or else they are not getting opportunities at law firms," Brown says.
While some temporary staffing firms say they also have noticed higher participation by African-American lawyers than might be expected, others say they have either not noticed the trend or else haven’t studied the ethnic makeup of their contract workers. The American Staffing Association, which conducts research on the contingent labor workforce, says it does not collect statistics on participation by African-American lawyers.
But Brown and other staffing professionals say that they are convinced that African-Americans and other minorities are clearly over-represented in the temporary legal staffing field.

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