As black corporate America gets richer, black law firms are standing outside with their noses pressed against the windowpane. Black lawyers, particularly members of the National Bar Association's commercial law division, say there is, at the very least, a bit of irony in the fact that many of the black entrepreneurs who have benefited from civil rights laws, federal minority business development programs and the steady patronage of African-American consumers haven't done more to send business their way. Venable, Baetjer and Howard L.L.P. Five of the top 25 rely exclusively on a black partner at a white law firm. Only two send all or the bulk of their matters to black-owned law firms.
Black lawyers say that they think the matter is far more complicated than that.
History and institutional pressure have often limited black entrepreneurs' ability to choose outside counsel, they acknowledge. Few black lawyers had extensive corporate law experience in the 1970s, when J. Bruce Llewellyn started the now-defunct Fedco Foods Corp. to serve New York's poor and minority communities. So, Mr. Rubin says, when Mr. Llewellyn started investing in Coca-Cola in the early 1980s, he hired him. Dial the phone number for Mr. Llewellyn's New York office and you get Rubin Baum. Until Mr. Llewellyn took over the bottling plant in 1985, Schnader Harrison had been the company's outside counsel.