Complaint Argues Racial Discrimination Inside Law Firms Trump Sanctioned

Americans for Equal Opportunity has filed a charge of race discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) on behalf of three white members, alleging some of the nation’s largest law firms and the nonprofit that selected and placed summer interns with those legal giants unlawfully discriminated against white Americans in the name of diversity. The EEOC charge filed this morning accuses the Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO) and its 44 partners — some of the country’s most well-heeled law firms — with operating a summer law fellowship program in violation of Title VII.

Title VII is the federal statute which prohibits employers, as well as employment agencies, from discriminating in employment on the basis of race, sex, color, national origin, or religion. And the EEOC charge filed by Americans for Equal Opportunity, a recently formed membership organization dedicated to “promot[ing] and protect[ing] the right of the public to be free from discrimination on the basis of race,” details how SEO allegedly violated Title VII through its discriminatory law fellowship program.

To support its EEOC charge, Americans for Equal Opportunity, or AEO, points to SEO’s own words. “SEO is the nation’s premier summer internship and training program targeting talented African American, Hispanic and Native college students,” the nonprofit’s Form 990 from 2019 boasted, adding: “Each year, SEO Career recruits, interviews, selects and trains several hundred interns and fellows for partners in banking, law, alternative investment and corporate leadership … To date SEO has recruited over 8,900 interns for its U.S. Partners.” A few years earlier, “SEO held itself out to prospective Sponsor Firms as ‘the nation’s only summer internship program for pre-law students of color.’”

Those sponsor firms included a veritable “who’s who,” of the nation’s top law firms, with the EEOC charge identifying the 44 entities who partnered in the SEO Fellowship program. Under the fellowship program, the law firms allegedly paid “SEO to recruit and place SEO Fellows in summer internship programs” for law-school bound college graduates, branded “0L,” in contrast to law students called 1L, 2L, or 3L, based on their year in law school. As the charge notes, large law firms rarely offer “0L” programs outside the SEO Fellowship, and, in fact, only a few top law students even obtain internships as 1Ls. (Read more from “Complaint Argues Racial Discrimination Inside Law Firms Trump Sanctioned” HERE)

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