P
H
OT
O
:
J
E
N
N
I
E
R
P
OT
T
H
E
IS
E
R
ON’T UNDERESTIMATE Pau-
lette Brown. Others have, and
time and again, she’s proven
them wrong. On this early fall
morning, the Morristown lawyer is the
picture of sedate self-possession as she
walks into the conference room at Locke
Lord, the international law firm where
she’s a partner. Pencil slim in a navy blue
pantsuit, not an unruly strand in her
glossily streaked bob, she couldn’t look
more like the successful legal profes-
sional that she is. But get her talking
about what she thinks really matters and
a sense of urgency burns through, as if
she is racing the clock.
In August, Brown, 64, became the
first woman of color to head the American Bar Association, the more than
400,000-member advocacy organization for the nation’s lawyers. As ABA
president, Brown has a bully pulpit from
which to advance the causes she feels are
critical to the profession—among them
diversity and inclusion, signature issues
for her in a profession that has been
notoriously slow to diversify. According
to ABA data, 88 percent of America’s
D
PEOPLE
Against the Clock
Paulette Brown, the first woman of color to lead
the nation’s lawyers, has an ambitious agenda for
diversity and judicial fairness—but just one year to
get the job done. By Leslie Garisto Pfaff
ROOM AT THE TOP:
Paulette Brown, the
first woman of color
to head the American Bar Association,
is making diversity
and inclusion the
signature issues of
her tenure.
lawyers are white, and while women
represent half of all law students, only 17
percent of equity partners at law firms
are female, and only 2 percent are women
of color.
But the pulpit Brown now enjoys
will be hers only until August 9, 2016,
when her one-year term ends. When
you’re out to change the world, that puts
you on a tight schedule. It also calls for
major multi-tasking. In November, for
instance, Brown traveled to China with
the ABA’s Section on International Law.
The trip coincided with a webinar she
agreed to lead on diversity and discrimination. The webinar kicked off at 1 AM
Beijing time. “So much to do, so little
time,” she says.
Indeed. Over the course of her 40-
year career, Brown has been in-house
counsel for several Fortune 500 companies, founded her own law firm, sat
as a municipal court judge, and served
as chief diversity officer at the global
firm Edwards Wildman, which merged
with Locke Lord earlier this year. In her
down time, Brown mentored hundreds
of lawyers—mostly women—pushed law
firms to hire more women and minori-ties, monitored elections in low-income
communities (as well as in South Africa
during the historic 1994 election of
Nelson Mandela), and headed both
the National Bar Association and the
Association of Black Women Lawyers
of New Jersey. She also chairs the New
Jersey State Bar Association’s labor and
employment division.
Amid all of this, Brown has not
shrugged off challenges in her personal
life. Two decades ago, she adopted an
8-year-old boy out of the foster system
and raised him as a single mother. (He is
now 31 and a kindergarten teacher.)
Tiffany Williams, an administrative
law judge for the State of New Jersey
and a longstanding mentee of Brown’s,
attributes her extraordinary energy to
“her passion and her purpose—her sense
of why she is here on Earth.”
BROWN GREW UP IN A WORKING-CLASS
family in Baltimore and attended the
city’s then segregated schools, but in
her achievement-oriented home, college was always on the horizon. Her
father, a truck driver, told her and her
