Elite Law Firms in Trouble with Civil Rights Law Again

The nation’s elite law firms are on the wrong side of the nation’s civil rights laws again. In March, many of those firms received letters from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission demanding information about their allegedly racially discriminatory hiring and promotion practices. In April, several of those firms settled with the EEOC and promised not to discriminate based on race when making hiring and promotion decisions and agreed to submit to ongoing monitoring.

This month, 44 of those firms, including ones that promised not to discriminate, have been accused of doing just that.

Americans for Equal Opportunity, a civil rights group, filed an EEOC complaint against these firms alleging that they have outsourced their race discrimination to a third party.

The complaint alleges that, for decades, a nonprofit called Sponsors for Educational Opportunity has served as a staffing agency for America’s most prestigious law firms.

Sponsors for Educational Opportunity’s law program recruits incoming law students before they have taken a single law school class and offers them fully paid internships at elite law firms with eye-watering pay of up to $4,000 per week.

The catch? Only certain races need apply.

The complaint alleges that Sponsors for Educational Opportunity selects and places pre-law interns almost entirely based on their race.  Although the program says that it’s open to people from “underrepresented backgrounds,” the complaint alleges that this means racial minorities only. White and Asian applicants who have applied are rejected, even if they come from underrepresented backgrounds, for example, if they are poor, the children of immigrants, or the first members of their family to go to college.

The complaint gathers quotations from Sponsors for Educational Opportunity’s public statements and from its employees, which paint a sordid picture of race discrimination.

Its website once described the program as “the nation’s only summer internship program for pre-law students of color.” One of its directors posted on social media that the program is “tailored for underrepresented minorities.”  And someone identifying as a recruiter for Sponsors for Educational Opportunity stated the program was limited mostly to “Black, Hispanic, and Native American students,” although “we do take other minority groups and mixed races into consideration.”

Sponsors for Educational Opportunity apparently wasn’t the only organization to publicly tout its racial focus. The complaint alleges that some of the firms that it partners with explicitly described the program in their own materials as targeting “students of color.”

The relationship between Sponsors for Educational Opportunity and the law firms is alleged to be very tight. The complaint alleges that most of the law firms don’t even interview the candidates themselves. They simply take who ever Sponsors for Educational Opportunity sends them, and Sponsors for Educational Opportunity sends them only applicants from its preferred races.

The failure of law firms to screen Sponsors for Educational Opportunity applicants has led to some embarrassment for the firms, the complaint alleges. For example, one of these applicants was hired at a corporate law firm even though she “runs an online store where she sells stickers endorsing the murder of corporate executives.” Another applicant reposted an X.com post saying “if you can f*** a white girl you can f*** a dog.” (redactions added).

The complaint attaches screenshots as exhibits.

It seems that elite law firms were so eager to hire associates from certain racial groups that they didn’t care about either merit or civil rights laws.

Their discriminatory zeal can be attributed in part to ideology. It’s no secret that the lawyers who run these firms are far to the left of most Americans. It can also be attributed in part to the pressure that the DEI industry and the Biden administration put them under. America’s law firms (and other corporations) faced a hard choice: suffer attacks along the lines that they have too many employees of the “wrong” races and ethnicities or quickly hack the hiring process by outsourcing illegal discrimination to a staffing firm. 

They seem to have chosen the latter. But there’s a problem: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act doesn’t permit race discrimination no matter how trendy it is. Title VII has always prohibited discrimination against everyone, only Democrat administrations haven’t enforced it equally, and progressive employers got accustomed to violating that law with impunity. 

Title VII bars employers and employment agencies from using race in hiring, firing, promotion, compensation, training, and all “conditions or privileges of employment.”

The Act anticipated that some discriminators would try to outsource their discrimination to third parties, so it expressly bans that too. It doesn’t matter if they dress up their discrimination with euphemisms like “diversity pipeline.” Discrimination is discrimination, and it’s unlawful.

The EEOC now has an opportunity, indeed an obligation, to investigate. If the facts alleged by Americans for Equal Opportunity are accurate, enforcement is not just warranted, but necessary. The lesson from 2024’s landmark Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard Supreme Court decision should not have been that race-based sorting must move from college campuses to corporate boardrooms. It should have been that such sorting is incompatible with the law, wherever it occurs.

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