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Seattle

Diversity is one of the core values at Davis Wright Tremaine, and is central to our recruiting, retention, and purchasing efforts. Our firmwide manager of diversity initiatives, Karen Russell, is based in Seattle, and spearheads our office’s many initiatives to promote diversity and inclusion at DWT and in the legal profession generally, as well as in the community at large.

For complete information on our firm’s recent diversity actions, as well as firm statistics, please see our latest Diversity & Inclusion Report.

Providing Scholarships for Diverse Students
Started in 2002, our 1L Diversity Scholarship Program offers a paid summer clerkship in our  Seattle or Portland office, and $7,500 for second-year tuition and expenses. It is open to diverse first-year law students who have a record of academic achievement and who are committed to civic involvement that promotes diversity. Since the program began, DWT has awarded 28 scholarships to diverse students. Five of DWT’s current associates are graduates of the program and two more will be joining the firm as associates in 2012.

Xiang Li, a student at Harvard Law School, was one of two recipients of the scholarship in 2011, and spent her summer working in DWT’s Seattle office. “It was great to be able to get professional legal experience during my first summer after law school,” she says. “Most 1L’s spend their summer externing for a judge or in other public interest jobs that maybe pay a stipend. I was doing very substantive work and earning close to a first-year associate’s salary.”

Li says she found DWT partners “very interested in getting to know summer associates and making sure they got the work they needed. The work I had was good balance between different practice groups.” Li was also impressed at a DWT diversity luncheon she attended where issues specific to diverse attorneys were discussed. “It was a tangible event, as opposed to just a tab on a website,” she says. “I had worked for Microsoft after college, and there, people come from all over the globe. Respect for diversity is something I wanted to find in a future employer as well.”