Bottom Line: Improving Diversity in the Legal Profession

The Bar Association of San Francisco in 2010
by Arturo J. González, 2010 BASF President

I was the sixth partner from Morrison & Foerster to serve as President of BASF in 2010, following Walter Burton Cope (1906-1909), Wendell T. Fitzgerald (1961-1962), Robert D. Raven (1971), James J. Brosnahan (1977), and Melvin R. Goldman (1995). In BASF's 150-year history, I am one of two Latinos to lead this organization, following Fred Alvarez (2000).

A focus of my term was improving diversity in our profession. Specifically, I wanted to know how partners of color in San Francisco law firms "made it." What are their backgrounds, and what advice do they have for more junior lawyers? Also, what can law firms and in-house counsel do to improve diversity in law firms? We formed a Bottom Line Partnership Task Force to help answer those questions. Task Force members interviewed every Latino and African-American partner at Bay Area law firms with more than 50 lawyers. We also interviewed 18 Asian-American partners, 12 law firm managing partners, and 10 in-house lawyers. We held a conference to disclose the Task Force's findings. Among them: cross-selling is key to the success of partners of color; pressure from clients is essential to diversifying law firms; partners of color are mobile (there are very few "lifers"); many partners of color come from the public sector; and to our surprise, the law school with the most partner of color alumni was not Harvard, Yale, or Stanford--it was the University of San Francisco. Thus, the Task Force recommended that law firms should expand their recruiting efforts beyond "first-tier" law schools.

One of the partners interviewed by the Task Force was Max Gutierrez, the first Latino partner at a large San Francisco law firm. My final publication as BASF President was a profile on Max, who attended San Francisco public schools, served in the Korean War, and graduated No. 1 in his class from the University of San Francisco Law School. He obtained his LLM from Georgetown, again graduating No. 1 in his class, and then joined Brobeck, Phleger, & Harrison, where he became partner in 1967.

During my tenure, I defended the independence of the judiciary by publishing an editorial in the Los Angeles Times, critiquing the Times' decision to report on the sexual orientation of Northern District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker, who adjudicated over the federal Proposition 8 case involving same-sex equal rights. With the assistance of past-BASF President Kelly Dermody (2012), my editorial concluded: "I object to The Times' reporting beyond the facts and legal analysis of the case to inject irrelevant and potentially inflammatory information about the personal characteristics of a judge. Doing so reflects a misguided presumption of heterosexual normativity that undermines the public's confidence in the rule of law based on biased assumptions about the impartiality of anyone without a heterosexual sexual orientation."

Finally, I sponsored a resolution against Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which was the broadest state measure involving immigration. In 2012, the Supreme Court struck down part, but not all, of that law. Arizona v. United States, 567 U.S. 387 (2012).