We at Terrell Marshall are outraged by the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Manny Ellis, Tony McDade, Charleena Lyles, and the countless other victims of systemic racism in America. Terrell Marshall supports the protests against police brutality and racism in the streets of Seattle, across America, and around the world. Black lives matter.
As a firm, we are committed to using our power as legal professionals to fight racism—both within our profession and in the wider world.
Our firm dedicates significant time to pro bono and other public interest work, such as our work with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Project challenging the use of debtors’ prisons in South Carolina. We are committed to maintaining that work through difficult economic times and focusing it in particular on cases that benefit people of color—especially Black and Indigenous people— following the lead of organizations on the front lines of the fight against racism. We have also decided to provide paid time to encourage our employees to combat police violence and other forms of systemic racism outside the workplace, including legal observing at Black Lives Matter protests, and poll protection work.
We also recognize that there is more to be done within our own company. We are a mostly white law firm. We have decided that changing this will require us to re-double our efforts to actively recruit diverse candidates for our hiring and internship pool. Like many small firms, we have relied on passive recruiting. Instead, going forward, we will send lawyers to career fairs, student groups, and other recruiting events that reach audiences with lawyers and law students who are people of color. We will also take more action to break down barriers of institutional racism that affect our profession, starting with contributing to targeted scholarships for pre-law and law students, among other measures.
Finally, we have created a group of employees whose job duties will now include identifying and dismantling barriers to inclusion and belonging for all people at the firm, as well as identifying additional ways we can fight racism inside and outside our firm. The steps we’ve already taken are just the beginning, and we hope the work of this group will sustain and enlarge these efforts until we have done everything possible to challenge and overcome the structural racism that persists in our country.