A quarter-century ago, Robert “Dean” Clayton was associate dean at Tulane Law School and had just founded the Texas/Tulane Minority Clerkship Program, a groundbreaking and successful effort that placed scores of minority first-year law students in Am Law 100 firms and Fortune 50 law departments until its disbandment in 1995.
As an authority on legal diversity efforts, Clayton found himself quoted alongside a 28-year-old summer associate in a July 1990 story in The Chicago Reporter, “Law Firms Still Lag in Minority Hiring,” which noted that black partners represented a stagnant 1.2 percent of all partners in Chicago firms.
