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The legal departments of DuPont, General Motors, Sara Lee, Shell Oil, and Wal-Mart, five of America’s leading corporations, announced initiatives last year to increase the amount of corporate legal work being sent out to minority-owned law firms.
These corporations were sparked into action by a DuPont Legal study, which revealed that the number of successful minority-owned law firms representing U.S. corporations has dwindled over the past 15 years.
The DuPont study entitled, Study on the Status of Minority-Owned Law Firms* identified problems that the initiatives are meant to address:
- Development of best practices to guide general counsel in driving the use of minority-owned law firms by both their in-house staffs and majority firms.
- Creation and dissemination of a national directory of minority-owned firms with the resources and expertise required by corporate America.
- Collaboration between minority-owned law firms and majority-owned firms on corporate legal matters.
The five legal departments pledged to promote these initiatives and invite others in the corporate legal community to include more minority-owned law firms in the departments’ circles of firms to whom they send legal work.
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