By many accounts, the legal profession is not where it should be when it comes to the inclusion of lawyers with disabilities. Attorneys with disabilities represent less than 1 percent of lawyers in U.S. law firms, according to a 2016 report from the National Association for Law Placement, a group that advocates for fair hiring in the field. Two in-house lawyers, one from Google Inc. and another from Microsoft Corp., who hope to change this, recently spoke about how they landed their positions and what they are doing within their companies to improve the numbers.
Along with the typical concerns any in-house attorney job applicant thinks about, Jack Chen, product counsel at Google, said at Baker & Hostetler’s “Removing Barriers to Work” event on Thursday in New York City that when he applied to Google in 2010, he considered whether to disclose at the outset that he had a disability. “I had always waited until the physical interview because I figured: Well, now that I’m there, they can’t kick me out, so I might as well wait,” said Chen, who is visually impaired. “But I took a different approach [with Google]. I disclosed my disability upfront, which was something I had never done before.”
This content has been archived. It is available through our partners, LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law.
To view this content, please continue to their sites.
Not a Lexis Subscriber?
Subscribe Now
Not a Bloomberg Law Subscriber?
Subscribe Now
LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law are third party online distributors of the broad collection of current and archived versions of ALM's legal news publications. LexisNexis® and Bloomberg Law customers are able to access and use ALM's content, including content from the National Law Journal, The American Lawyer, Legaltech News, The New York Law Journal, and Corporate Counsel, as well as other sources of legal information.
For questions call 1-877-256-2472 or contact us at [email protected]
