Australian lawyer visiting in western U.S.

Michele Payne (mclaco@igc.apc.org)
Wed, 7 Sep 1994 10:05:09 -0700

I am a lawyer in Western Australia and have been involved in a
project aimed at boosting the rates of participation/employment by
indigenous Australians in the legal profession. The project has
been established jointly by the Law Society of Western Australia
and the Department of Employment Education and Training. We are in
the third year of a 5 year project. One aim has been to encourage
Aboriginal Australians who are studying law (a particularly small
group in any event) to choose to practice in the private
profession (rather than being siphoned off into government via
public service cadetships during their training). We offer a
cadetship (financial support/scholarship) during the student's
period of study for his or her degree/s and arrange a law firm to
take on a mentoring role during that period, with a further
guarantee of an articled clerkship on completion of study.
(Students must complete one year of supervised practical work in a
law firm as articled law clerks before being eligible to be
admitted as legal practitioners in our state).

The second part of our project is aimed at encouraging employment
of Aboriginal Australians as support staff in legal firms - legal
secretaries, word processor operators, paralegals, office
administrators and the like. Our main difficulty here has been
that almost all such positions require a fairly high degree of
training and /or experience, and our although our programme will
provide money for traineeships, members of our profession have
little experience of taking on subsidised employees who also
require time off to go to technical college one day a week. The
principal task we have here is to persuade the firms who are
members of our Society to modify their employment practices and
accomodate such employees. (There would be less than 10 such
employees in our profession at the moment). Additionally, our
co-ordinator is trying to find ways of encouraging Aboriginal
Australians to consider a career in our profession - a difficult
task in a group which to date has few role models.

Aboriginal Australians constitute approximately two and a half
percent of the Australian population, and in Western Australia,
our population supports approximately 3,000 lawyers who are
primarily white, although with an increasingly large Asian
component.

While I am visiting the US, I'd like to meet, if possible, with
any group with affirmative action programmes for employment of
Native Americans (or any other small minority group for that
matter) in the professions, to compare notes, swap ideas etc.

I am currently in San Francisco, and will also be in Seattle,
Houston and other parts of the South West during September.

Michele Payne Aboriginal Employment Action Committee Law Society
of Western Australia Email: in US: mclaco@igc.apc.org
- in Australia: mclaco@peg.apc.org