AYLA PRESIDENT: Gamble on Our Profession’s Future at the 2023 Casino Night Fundraiser

According to a recent Mitchell Hamline Law Review study(1), the legal profession is the least diverse profession in the nation. Let that superlative sink in. The 2023 Leadership Academy Casino Night event on June 24, 2023 takes aim at that issue by raising funds to support the Youth Justice Alliance (YJA), a local nonprofit dedicated to investing in aspiring first-generation lawyers.

The same study found that 88 percent of U.S. attorneys are White. Less than five percent of associates are Black, which is less than the percentages of the same in 2009. According to the Youth Justice Alliance, roughly 19 percent of the U.S. population is Hispanic and roughly 13 percent is Black, whereas each group makes up only roughly five percent of the U.S. attorney population, respectively.

The same study notes that, by 2014, law school student bodies were made up of roughly onethird racial or ethnic minorities, but such groups only constituted 6.6 percent of equity partners at law firms as of 2019—a stark difference, in light of the fact that the Non-Hispanic White demographic made up only 61.6 percent of the U.S. population, per the 2020 census. Sweatt v. Painter has been the law of the land since 1950, and thus 70 years of “access” to legal education has not been enough on its own to heal the demographic disparities in our profession. With rumblings of an impending Supreme Court decision striking down Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the task of systemically facilitating diversity within the legal profession will fall largely to nonprofits.

Enter YJA. Austin’s own Armin Salek founded the group after his AISD high school legal course won the 2020 Dan Rather Prize for the Best Idea to Innovate Texas Education. He subsequently received a Zuckerman Fellowship to the Harvard Graduate School of Education to scale the Akins High School model to other campuses. YJA offers benefits that include, but are not limited to, paid training, paid internships, LSAT funding, classroom education, and mentorship to aspiring first-generation attorneys. One of the group’s main strategies is to address disparity early—far earlier than Big Law minority quotas or the law school admissions process. YJA provides high school students access to resources and institutional knowledge about opportunities in the legal profession to promote a “proactive model” of diversity. The end goal is to democratize access to legal knowledge and legal careers, organically reduce population-attorney demographic disparities long-term, and help facilitate a profession better suited to providing legal services to under-supported communities.

Every year since 2012, AYLA and the Austin Bar Association have jointly run a program known as Leadership Academy. Roughly 30 local attorneys are chosen yearly from a pool of applicants. Each year’s class goes through a regimen of lectures and inter- active events all geared toward developing leadership skills. Perhaps more importantly, each class is tasked with working together to plan and execute one large class project. The class must design the project, determine the leadership structure for the planning and execution of it, and then get to work making it happen—all on their own.

The 2023 Leadership Academy class is hosting the Casino Night event to raise money to help YJA further its goals. The June 24 event at Chateau Bellevue will feature blackjack, craps, and other games, and include an open bar, live music, and a silent auction. Four different levels of sponsorships are available, and all contributions are tax-deductible.

Donate, attend, place your bets, bid, and enjoy a night of music and libations. By the time the night is over, gambling on our profession’s future will have never felt so good.

Footnotes

1 Sybil Dunlop and Jenny GassmanPines, Why the Legal Profession Is the Nation’s Least Diverse (And How to Fix It), 47(1) Mitchell Hamline L.Rev. 129 (2021).