 "Paulette Brown")
In August last year, Paulette Brown became the first woman of colour to be the president in the 137-year history of American Bar Association (ABA), a 400,000-member advocacy group for United States' legal fraternity. in a recent visit to India, Brown shares with Sudipto Dey her views on opening up the Indian legal service, and efforts to improve diversity in the profession. Edited excerpts:
What is your take on the issue of opening up the Indian legal services to foreign law firms? Some big Indian law firms have advocated a gradual opening up, spread over three to five years.
The legal services in the United States are regulated state by state, but there is no prohibition against Indian lawyers practising in the United States. In New York alone, 172 Indian lawyers recently took the New York Bar exam. In the United States, every lawyer, no matter where they are from, has to take the Bar exam.
We like the idea of US lawyers practising in India, appearing for arbitrations in India, consulting with their clients, and running consultancies. We are hopeful that we can accelerate this process. If this can happen in three years, then it is good news. However, we are continuing our dialogue with the Bar Council of India (on this).
Is there pressure from the US businesses to cajole your counterparts in India to open up?
Businesses are always more comfortable with lawyers who understand them, and the legal implications from the United States side. Similarly, businesses coming from India to the United States will be very comfortable with an Indian lawyer being able to provide legal advice in the US. Opening up legal services mutually benefits clients, lawyers, from both sides.
There have been huge divisions within the American legal fraternity over non-lawyers offering legal services. In India too there was this issue of big-ticket accounting and transaction advisory services firms offering legal advice to their clients - something that the legal fraternity has not been happy with.
The American Bar Association in a recent meeting passed a resolution that certain types of cases can be handled by non-lawyers, but they still have to be regulated. Each State will decide whether they want to regulate non-lawyers to provide certain types of services, and how they will be supervised. This is more to do with access to justice, and not so much about corporates. This resolution is aimed at creating more access to justice for people who would not ordinarily have that.
In the United States, law firms cannot be owned by non-lawyers. Similarly, even if a lawyer works for an accounting firm, they do not provide legal advice outside the context of the organisation they work for.
Are there any lessons for the Indian legal fraternity from your journey and passion to improve gender diversity in the profession?
People have to be very open to acceptance of who you are - don't judge people before you know anything about them. I was always taught to take people as they come to you. I have learnt that you cannot seclude yourself, but be an active participant. If you are not at the table, your voice can never be heard.
The American Bar Association is little different from the rest of the legal profession in the United States. After me there will be two more women presidents - so we will have three female presidents in a row.
Having three woman presidents - is that by design?
Not by design necessarily. But, I had to carefully plan the run-up (to presidency), listening to people who have won before, or people who have been around longer than I have. One has to be very active in various activities of the Association over the years.
Your term ends in August this year. How do you plan to take the agenda of gender diversity - especially among coloured women - forward?
Women - all of us - have an obligation to make sure that there are other people in the pipeline who can come behind us. It is all about being inclusive, and not excluding anyone from having the same opportunity. From the time I took office in August last year, I am trying to mainstream ABA. I have visited 33 of the 50 states already, and hope to visit all the States before end of my term. Apart from building the pipeline, we are working on number of things to make our profession more diverse and inclusive. One of the things we are tackling is implicit biases. We are creating training tools for judges, prosecutors and public defenders, so that they can understand their unconscious biases, and help them to move from there.
According to studies around 88 per cent of all lawyers in United States are white. We hope to take the non-White numbers from 12 to 25 per cent over the next 10 years - to be reflective of the demographic profile of the United States.
