CSBA President Fujie Returns for API Week
California State Bar Association (CSBA) President Holly Fujie, who visited King Hall last month as part of a panel discussion on the special challenges facing successful women attorneys, returned to speak on "Redefining the Legal Landscape" in the Wilkins Moot Courtroom March 18 as part of the Asian Pacific Islander (API) Week Celebration.
Fujie, who said she is only the third woman and the first Asian American to serve as CSBA president, is a graduate of the UC Berkeley School of Law and a partner at the Los Angeles firm Buchalter Nemer. Her lecture was sponsored by the UC Davis Asian Pacific American Law Student Association (APALSA) as part of a series of events during API Week.
"Right now, the economy is defining everything," Fujie began. "We have to take that back, and redefine the legal landscape ourselves." Fujie said that during the economic downturn, the legal community has been retracting, which affects hiring and has the potential to impact diversity. Asian Americans have made significant inroads into the legal profession, but because they are relatively recent arrivals, they have the potential to be disproportionately impacted by layoffs.
"I think this is something that we, as Asian Americans, need to be proactive about to keep from sliding backwards," she said.
Fujie said that one thing CSBA and law schools can do to help promote the increased presence of Asian Americans and other underrepresented groups is to provide the means for students and young professionals to find appropriate mentors. She described her own background, growing up in a "bad part of town" in Oakland and not having role models in the legal community, so that even after she decided to go to law school she really had little sense of what the career possibilities were. Pairing young attorneys with experienced, successful professionals can help provide a sense of the possibilities and help with career planning, she said, as well as give aspiring attorneys a sense of what some of the possible pitfalls may be.
"What we should be doing is matching people who want to go into government with people working in government, people who want to go to work at a private firm with people at private firms, people who want to go into legal aid with people in legal aid, so that it's easier to figure out the maze of options and to set goals," she said.