Files

• "Pathways to Success" event flyer
• Report of the Diversity Committee of the Central Pennsylvania Chapter of American Corporate Counsel

Description

The Central Pennsylvania Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) has found an exciting way to use our legal skills to increase our contributions to the local community. Partnering with Street Law, Inc. and regional urban high schools, and coordinating our efforts with the Pennsylvania Bar Association through its Pro Bono Coordinator, we hope that this pro bono work will be rewarding not only to those to whom we offer assistance, but also to our members.

The StreetLaw program is part of the pipeline initiative, which continues ACC's longstanding commitment to diversity and is a response to the call from leaders of organized bars and the July 20, 1999, U.S. Presidential Call to Action to the legal profession: namely, for lawyers to become leaders in teaching youth about protecting the rule of law and to help create paths that will prime a more diverse pipeline to the profession. The program also recognizes the responsibility of every lawyer to render public interest service. Rule 6.1 of the Pennsylvania Rules of Professional Conduct provides in part:

A lawyer should render public interest service. A lawyer may discharge this responsibility by ... service in activities for improving the law, the legal system or the legal profession ...

Pipeline programs are premised on the belief that, although it is important to promote more minorities and women to senior level positions in the profession, our efforts will be hampered if there are still too few members of those groups who decide to enter the profession in the first place. The Central Pennsylvania StreetLaw Diversity Pipeline project reaches out to at-risk, disadvantaged children while they are still in school to encourage them to think about law as a career, to instill in them a belief that they have the skills and support to succeed in a legal career, and to provide the positive feedback and mentoring that kids undertaking a commitment to the law will need to succeed.

Our lawyer members will serve as an "outside resource" in a class or as a mentor to a student. We will:

• Make lessons come alive by sharing first-hand experiences and answering students' questions.
• Provide job-shadowing opportunities.
• Provide technical assistance to teachers in implementing activities such as mock trials and moot courts.
• Facilitate field trips so that students (and teachers) can experience various aspects of the law firsthand.
• Serve as positive role models.

Our partner in implementing this program is Street Law, Inc., which assisted McDonald’s Corporation’s legal department in implementing a successful program in the Chicago area. Street Law's mission is to provide school-age children a meaningful educational and highly participatory look at law, democracy, and human rights. Through its philosophy and its programs, Street Law empowers students and the lawyer volunteers to transform democratic ideals into action, offering participants essential lessons they can use for the rest of their lives. The law-related education that Street Law offers encourages kids from disadvantaged communities, who might never have had the motivation, to consider law as a career, whether as lawyers, paralegals, administrative support staff, or law enforcement officials.

This partnership with Street Law will provide our attorneys with the opportunity to work with schools serving diverse student bodies in traditionally under-resourced communities in the Central Pennsylvania area. In our first year with the program, our volunteers will work with designated teachers at the Milton Hershey School in Hershey and William Penn Senior High School in York. In the future we hope to add other schools within the area we serve, such as the John Harris High School in Harrisburg. We will help teach, mentor, and offer opportunities and encouragement to students at these schools. Our program is modeled after the program developed by McDonald's, which consists of several components: a Fall Kick-Off Conference, a Lawyer-Teacher Partnership, and an End of Year Recognition Event.

We will hold the Kick-Off Conference on October 21, 2003, at the GIANT™ Center in Hershey. At the Conference we will bring together high school students for a day-long program that will allow them to interact with people who can act as role models, learn some elementary legal principles, and hopefully, have some fun.

Our volunteers will teach classes on legal topics related to business, such as the legal implications of downloading music from the Internet and personal injury lawsuits. We will then serve lunch and host a career fair using small discussion groups that will enable the students to learn more about what lawyers, paralegals, and other legal professionals do. There will also be a fun project in the afternoon, including an adapted Monopoly game that incorporates legal concepts. Students will then return to their schools in the afternoon, taking with them a number of corporate giveaways as tokens of their day.

For the Lawyer-Teacher Partnership, we hope to partner a team of lawyers with a teacher at each of the high schools. As a minimum commitment, we will have the team conduct two-classroom visits per semester. During visits, the lawyers may present a lesson or help coach students in preparation for a mock trial, depending upon the teacher’s needs. The team would also be expected to provide interim guidance to the teacher by phone or e-mail. Finally, we would like to plan an opportunity for interested students to "job shadow" for a day, either at one of our members' companies or at one of the outside law firms we use.

Ultimately, we would like to select a few outstanding students for recognition. At this time, we are thinking about having a recognition event that would include the students' families and teachers. We are also considering the possibility of awarding a college scholarship, as well as presenting participation certificates to students and recognizing the work of the teachers.

The legal profession lags behind other services professions in terms of participation by diverse and disadvantaged groups. Many associations and corporations implemented pipeline programs as long ago as the 1980s. The legal profession needs to act now to make up for lost time and lost generations. With the Central Pennsylvania StreetLaw Diversity Pipeline program the attorneys in Central Pennsylvania ACC hope to contribute to reaching this important goal.