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VSB diversity panel wants to boost lawyer involvement

The Virginia State Bar’s task force on diversity will focus on attracting more minorities to the profession and on encouraging more minorities to participate in bar activities once they become members of it.

To that end, Joseph A. Condo, the McLean attorney and former VSB president who chairs the 15-member task force, appointed committees at the group’s first meeting on July 28 to explore leadership and participation by minorities in the VSB and other bar groups, to analyze “pipeline” issues, and to develop ways to fund projects for minorities.

Condo noted that the Millennium Diversity Initiative was created in 2000 as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization during his VSB presidency as a vehicle to channel grants and other financing for diversity projects. As an example of the way the initiative can be used, grants for the annual Oliver Hill/Samuel Tucker Pre-Law Institute for high school students are channeled through it, he said.

VSB President Manuel A. Capsalis created the task force to address what he has said will be on of the two issues – public protection is the other – to which he will devote most of his attention during his term.

Capsalis told the group that the legal system must be more reflective of society demographically if it is to be responsive to it.

Perhaps more important, respect for the rule of law is undermined if minorities don’t perceive it as protecting them, he said.

Condo said a major concern in 2000 was the wide disparity between whites and minorities on the pass rate for the bar exam.

That disparity it still too wide and can perhaps be addressed by a program that matches attorneys with minority students while they are in law school and an effort to have attorneys tutor minority law students who have failed the bar exam.

“But addressing the problem after law school is a decade or a decade and a half too late,” he said. Middle and high school students need more exposure to lawyers and legal system to give them the impetus to become part of it, he said.

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