Central Pennsylvania Business Journal
By:  David Dagan

Alaisha Robinson has always wanted to be a lawyer, but she learned something disappointing during a recent internship at Thomas Thomas & Hafer in Harrisburg.

“They don’t argue,” Robinson said. “No one ever goes to trial. It kind of shattered my dreams.”

Robinson, 18, was able to pick up the pieces of her dreams soon enough. Next year she will start a pre-law program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana County.

Robinson is black, and she knows that she’s entering a profession where the black population is under-represented. Robinson also is braced to encounter discrimination as she works toward her goal of becoming a lawyer who works on domestic-violence cases.

But that won’t stop her.

“Once I’m determined to do something, I’m stuck on it,” she said.

Robinson is a student at SciTech High in Harrisburg. She has spent one day each month since September at Thomas Thomas & Hafer, together with Lawrence Reynolds, another black SciTech High student who plans to become a lawyer.

Reaching out to young people is one important prong in efforts to diversify the midstate’s legal community, lawyers said.

Those efforts are getting an extra push now as legal organizations unveil new diversity initiatives.

Law firms are focusing on diversity because it’s right and it’s good business, said Samuel T. Cooper III, an attorney at Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott in Harrisburg who is advising Widener University School of Law on a new diversity initiative.

Minorities are hindered from entering the legal field both by active discrimination and by non-malicious factors, he said. But major corporations are pushing their law-firm clients to become more diverse, Cooper said. And as the minority population in the United States grows, law firms would do well to keep up, he said.

“The most successful law firms, the law firms of tomorrow, will be certainly more diverse and go after a more diverse clientele,” he said.

A group of local law firms has launched a new summer internship program for minority law-school students. Eight students will be paid $4,500 each this summer to work at a local law firm. They were selected from a pool of about 40 applicants, said David Lehman, an organizer of the initiative and an attorney at McNees Wallace and Nurick in Harrisburg.

Local law firms often say they have trouble attracting minority candidates to this region. That’s simply part of the challenge they must tackle, Lehman said.

The internship program is an initiative of the Capital Area Managing Partners Diversity Initiative, a group founded in 2004 by local law firms. The Dauphin County Bar Association also hosts an annual job-recruitment program for minority law students. The effort usually results in 30 to 40 interviews and three to five job offers, of which two may be accepted, Lehman said.

The York County Bar Association and Lancaster Bar Association also recently launched initiatives aimed at helping law firms hire more minority attorneys. Leaders in York said they also want to reach out to local youth, encourage referrals among law firms that are mostly white and those that are minority-owned, and make minority attorneys generally feel more welcome.

Observers said it’s important to work further down the legal pipeline, as well.

The Harrisburg campus of the Widener University School of Law recently established an advisory committee to help the school become more diverse. The committee is studying admissions, career-planning services, student life, and faculty and staff hiring practices, said Loren D. Prescott Jr., a vice dean and professor of law at the Susquehanna Township school.

Students only apply to law school if they’re interested.

Reynolds credits his interest in the law to Street Law, a program that encourages high-school students to enter the legal field. In the midstate, Street Law targets three high schools with large minority populations — the Milton Hershey School, SciTech High and William Penn Senior High School in York.

Students learn about the law, participate in mock trials and visit courtrooms and law firms. Street Law is a national program. The local version was set up a few years ago by the Central Pennsylvania chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel.

“There aren’t that many minorities who want to pursue a career in law, or they just physically can’t,” Reynolds said, because of financial constraints. He said programs like Street Law work to raise interest.

His internship at Thomas Thomas & Hafer affirmed his interest in the law. He will attend James Madison University next year and expects to pursue a business management major and pre-law minor.

The law firm set up the internship through a SciTech High program that sends students to workplaces on the third Wednesday of every month to explore careers.

“Life to me is a big funnel, and you start out at the top with all sorts of options,” said R. Burke McLemore Jr., a partner at Thomas Thomas & Hafer. It’s important to introduce students to the law before they narrow those options, he said.

SciTech High generally aims to introduce its students, many of them minorities, to professions where minorities are underrepresented, said Monica Gillis, the school’s community partnership facilitator.

“When they look at these fields, they just don’t see themselves,” she said.