taken to sweating out my office frustrations at after-work aerobics. As months
passed, our feelings stayed steady and reliable. For me, it became one less thing in
life to question.
At Sidley & Austin, I was part of the Chicago office’s recruiting team, tasked
with interviewing Harvard Law School students for summer-associate jobs. It was
essentially a wooing process. As a student, I’d experienced for myself the power
and temptation of the corporate-law industrial complex, having been given a
binder as thick as a dictionary that listed law firms across the country and told that
every one of them was interested in landing Harvard-educated lawyers. It would
seem that with the imprimatur of a Harvard JD, you had a shot at working in any
city, in any field of law, whether it be at a mammoth litigation firm in Dallas or a
boutique real-estate firm in New York. If you were curious about any of them,
you requested an on-campus interview. If that went well, you were then treated
to a “fly-out,” which amounted to a plane ticket, a five-star hotel room, and
another round of interviews at the firm’s office, followed by some extravagant
wine-and-dine experience with recruiters like me. While at Harvard, I’d availed
myself of fly-outs to San Francisco and Los Angeles, in part to check out
entertainment-law practices there but also, if I was honest, because I’d never been
to California.
Now that I was at Sidley and on the other side of the recruiting experience,
my goal was to bring in law students who were not just smart and hard-driving
but also something other than male and white. There was exactly one other
African American woman on the recruiting team, a senior associate named
Mercedes Laing. Mercedes was about ten years older than I was and became a
dear friend and mentor. Like me, she had two Ivy League degrees and routinely
sat at tables where nobody looked like her. The struggle, we agreed, was not to
get used to it or accept it. In meetings on recruitment, I argued insistently—and
I’m sure brazenly, in some people’s opinion—that the firm cast a wider net when
it came to finding young talent. The long-held practice was to engage students
from a select group of law schools—Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Northwestern, the
University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois, primarily—the places where
most of the firm’s lawyers had earned their degrees. It was a circular process: one
generation of lawyers hiring new lawyers whose life experience mirrored their
own, leaving little room for diversity of any sort. In fairness to Sidley, this was a
problem (whether recognized or not) at virtually every big firm in the country. A
National Law Journal survey from the time found that in large firms African
Americans made up not quite 3 percent of all associates and less than 1 percent of