(Courtesy of Diverse Attorney Pipeline Program) (Courtesy of Diverse Attorney Pipeline Program)

A Chicago nonprofit that helps women law students of color get their feet in the door at law firms is looking to financially support students across the country who have lost their summer internships.

Summer internships at law firms are a critical source of funding for these students, said Tiffany Harper and Chasity Boyce, co-founders of the Diverse Attorney Pipeline Program. DAPP is looking to raise at least $100,000 to fill this gap, they said.

"We don't want people to have to leave school because they were displaced somewhere and they don't have a way to fund themselves," said Harper, who serves as first deputy treasurer and chief of staff for the city of Chicago.

DAPP's Displaced Student Stipend Fund and Fellowship will award up to $5,000 to law student women of color who have lost their first-year internships at a law firm or a company due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The program will also pair students with lawyers, who will act as mentors and help train the students to become lawyers.

"The 1L summer is critically important to what opportunities students have when they graduate law school," said Boyce, who said the goal of the program is to help women law students of color become "the most marketable they can be." Boyce is the vice president, head of inclusion and diversity at Heitman, a real estate investment management firm.

A number of law firms have canceled their summer associate and 1L internship programs in reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some firms have promised to pay students anyway or offer them jobs after graduation. But not all.

Earlier this month, the Georgia Latino Law Foundation launched a five-week virtual judicial internship program for second-year students whose summer associate programs were also canceled.

DAPP began accepting applications for the program on May 26, a day after George Floyd's death in the custody of Minneapolis police officers. The country has been gripped by protests against police brutality and racial injustice, but even absent those events, the urgency to bolster the number of women of color practicing law remains the same, Harper said.

"I think we have the same urgency as before because systemic racism has always had an impact on diversity and inclusion in the legal profession," she said. "There are many barriers to advancement for women of color lawyers that come out of the same racism that protesters are fighting against."

Harper and Boyce graduated from law school in 2008 and 2009, respectively, at the height of the Great Recession. The measures the U.S. legal industry took then to weather the economic fallout greatly affected lawyers of color. In 2019, the percentage of black or African American law associates working in large law firms finally—and barely—surpassed its 2009 level, according to a 2019 study from the National Association of Legal Placement.

That same study found that "the overall arc of the storyline for large law firm diversity remains the same—it is one of slow incremental gains for women and people of color in both the associate and partnership ranks, interrupted by some recession-era setbacks, but at a rate so slow as to almost seem imperceptible at times."

Harper and Boyce are hoping to avoid a repeat of the past. DAPP has already seeded the fund with $20,000 of its own money, Boyce said. The group is hoping to raise more money from law firms, bar associations, companies and other groups. But they acknowledged it's a tough ask to make at a time when law firms are cutting salaries and partner distributions, and furloughing or laying off lawyers and staff, in order to preserve their own liquidity.

"I definitely think I'm worried," Harper said. "We might have people who just can't do it. Our hope is some people stretch a little bit and remember what happened in '09. We lost so much progress that we had made in the legal profession. It doesn't take much to fund something like this."

Apart from its seed money, DAPP has raised another $5,000 or so and has received commitments from other organizations, Harper said. DAPP is accepting applications for the program through June 12. DAPP separately offers a yearlong program for first-year women law students of color at Chicago-area law schools. But the organization's Displaced Student Stipend Fund and Fellowship is available to women of color in their first year of law school across the country, Boyce said.

DAPP has received 50 applications so far. Harper said she was flooded with messages and emails from law students asking about the program without having done any real outreach besides posting information on social media.

"I have to assume there's a great need out there," Harper said.

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