I will always remember one particular night in my childhood home in California. The doorbell rang, I heard hushed talking and then my father called me in to the entryway. I was intrigued. I saw a woman standing there smiling, waiting expectantly in a black skirt suit. I thought she looked smart.
My father eagerly introduced her with excitement I didn’t often see from him. He said, “Michelle, this is Susan. She’s a lawyer and a mom. She helps people prepare their trusts and wills every day, and she has three kids at home. I wanted you to meet her so you could see that you can be an attorney if that’s what you want to do.”
I remember my father being that explicit. And it meant the world to me. He wanted me to meet a woman who worked as a lawyer and was a mom, because he knew that’s what I wanted.
And I had never met a woman who did both.
People need to see that their dream is possible. People need to see someone that looks like them doing the thing they want to do. Then, it becomes possible.
The Utah legal community, including the bench, is currently lacking in membership. And I say that as an elected bar commissioner for the Third District (my three-year term will expire this summer). We’re lacking diversity, even after years worth of trendy diversity initiatives. The change is happening too slowly.
In 2011 the Utah Bar was 91 percent Caucasian and 76 percent male. Today, female membership still sits around 25 percent, and there are fewer female law students attending Utah schools compared with the nation’s average.
It matters. Increasing inclusion could affect how our judicial system treats minorities. Attorneys could connect more with the clients, thereby serving client needs efficiently and effectively. Minority defendants could face less implicit bias from more diverse judges.
A new nonprofit organization, created by attorneys Melinda Bowen and Kristen Olsen, with its board chaired by legal all-star retired Justice Christine M. Durham and Francis M. Wikstrom, is hoping to change this lackluster diversity in Utah’s legal community.
(Scott Sommerdorf | The Salt Lake Tribune) Justice Justice Christine Durham is retiring after 35 years on the Utah Supreme Court. She poses for a photo leaning on the chair she most recently used during her time on Utah's highest court, Thursday, Nov. 16, 2017.
The Utah Center for Legal Inclusion, or UCLI for short, is “dedicated to advancing the goals of equity and inclusion in Utah’s legal profession.”
UCLI has six primary areas of focus: education, advancement, organizational inclusion, community outreach, tracking progress and development. It hopes to create a pipeline, starting in K-12 schools, of students primed and prepared for the legal profession.
One of UCLI’s messages is that the business community can also make a difference. It can demand parity from its attorneys — within the firm, within the firm’s leadership and on each specific case.
Wikstrom told 75 to 100 attorneys gathered in a downtown office Tuesday evening that most people have good intentions, but they are just guilty of fishing in the same pond. We need to find, or create, other ponds.
Durham echoed that sentiment with an example of court rules committees over the past 30 years. Committees used to be made up of the same people, over and over, as justices sat around a table and asked each other whom they knew.
They were fishing in the same pond. By focusing on increasing diversity, Durham said the courts saw a greater richness and advantage, even economic advantage, to the legal community.
We do have glimmers of hope. Utah’s Court of Appeals right now has a majority of female judges.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Court of Appeals justices, from left, Michele Christiansen, Kate Toomey, Jill Pohlman, Ryan Harris, Diana Hagen, David Mortensen and Gregory Orme, in Salt Lake City Tuesday Aug. 8, 2017.
But it’s not only gender that makes a community diverse. All sorts of diverse backgrounds matter.
For example, Supreme Court Justice Paige Petersen is from rural Emery County. The kids at Carbon High School can look to her to see what’s possible for them.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Supreme Court justices Thomas R. Lee, Constandinos Himonas, John A. Pearce and Paige Petersen, from left, listen to Chief Justice Matthew B. Durrant give the State of the Judiciary speech to the Legislature in the House chamber on the first day of the 2018 legislative session at the Utah Capitol on Monday, Jan. 22, 2018.
UCLI plans to support organizations already dedicated to inclusion, including organizations committed to minority lawyers, women lawyers, young lawyers and LGBT lawyers.
The fact is, Utah’s population is becoming more diverse. Minorities now account for 21 percent of Utah’s population, compared with 19 percent in 2010. It may not seem like a lot, but minority populations are growing faster (20.3 percent) than the white population (8 percent).
Demographer Pam Perlich describes it as “the new Utah.”
The Utah State Bar needs to embrace the new Utah not just for professional security, but for community betterment as well.
So introduce your friends and neighbors to a diverse attorney you know today, and help UCLI improve Utah’s legal community.
Michelle Quist is an editorial writer for the Salt Lake Tribune who is grateful to her father for helping her make her dreams reality. She just hopes he‘s not disappointed that she's already retired.
