DLA Piper’s Excuse For Cracking Down On Diversity As Embarrassing As You’d Think It Is

DLA Piper has exciting news! They’ve got a story in American Lawyer with a headline trumpeting their $4 billion revenue haul!

Presumably, the firm would rather folks focus on that than the much more important recent news that the firm clumsily purged attorneys’ pronouns from their email signature blocks and then followed it up by nuking all firm affinity groups. As any incident response team knows… change the narrative!

But while the headline doesn’t show it, American Lawyer didn’t let DLA Piper off the hook entirely. The article concludes by addressing the hostile work environment elephant in the room. After some bland platitudes using words like “mindful” and “journey,” DLA Piper global co-chair, global CEO, and Americas chair Frank Ryan explained:

Ryan added that, while Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 hasn’t changed, the way the law is interpreted and enforced has. “If you’re advising clients that Title VII means X and you’re not functioning that way, if you’re not applying it as if it means X, that is something firms in particular need to be mindful of,” Ryan said.

This is one of those explanations that probably sounded better in his head. Or “its” head. I wouldn’t want to accidentally give a DLA Piper attorney a pronoun.

The executive branch has taken a different enforcement position, but nothing about the law has changed. They’ve also stopped enforcing the laws against storming government buildings, but I don’t think the firm is advising clients to take a dump in Nancy Pelosi’s office. Or, hell, maybe they are — billable hours are billable hours and you’ve got to hustle to get $4 billion in revenue.

More analogous — and a much more likely scenario for DLA’s clients — the administration also publicly abandoned enforcing foreign bribery laws, but I can’t imagine the firm is actively advising clients to affirmatively violate the clear text of the FCPA. Especially considering the statute of limitations will survive into the next administration. It’s one thing to tell a client in breach that they probably won’t be prosecuted and another to tell them to act like it’s Purge Night because Donald Trump autopenned an executive order pretending statutes don’t exist.

Would the Trump administration really argue that allowing lawyers to voluntarily display pronouns in emails or supporting a monthly lunch meeting for Black lawyers could amount to violations of Title VII? I’m not sure even this DOJ could justify the resources for that. Affirmative action is one thing, but voluntary diversity support programs are a lot different. If they did, they would surely lose. Yet eliminating those policies — without some further congressional or judiciary action — could very well form the basis of a future hostile work environment complaint. I’m not sure “we trusted an executive order over the language of a statute” would be a particularly powerful defense.

Much like the cinema classic Office Space, the only real motivation here is not to be hassled. The firm doesn’t want to have to spend the resources to inevitably defeat a hypothetical retaliatory strike over allowing a paralegal to sign off as “she/her.” For a small business struggling to make ends meet, that might be understandable. For a collection of lawyers, it’s embarrassing.

Especially when those lawyers have $4 billion a year to work with.

Earlier: Biglaw Firm Scrubs Pronouns From Attorney Signatures Without Telling Anyone
DLA Piper Building ‘Community’ By Shutting Down Affinity Groups

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