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Tonkon Torp is committed to developing a workforce that is diverse and represents the perspectives and experiences of our clients and communities. We, along with our clients, recognize diversity and inclusiveness as imperative to business success. Diversity strengthens us as a firm, as it expands our talent pool, enhances our responsiveness to clients, and adds valuable breadth and depth of perspective to the complex problems we help our clients solve.
We are building a diverse workforce by both evolution and design. We strive to promote a workplace that is effective in recruiting diverse staff, law graduates and lateral candidates, and in retaining and advancing to partnership minority and women lawyers. Our policies and our culture encourage individuals of diverse backgrounds to join and remain with the firm. We offer a generous parental leave policy to both men and women, and a formal part-time lawyer policy.
The firm has appointed a Diversity Partner to coordinate our diversity initiatives. A Diversity Task Force made up of interested staff and lawyers assists the firm in identifying barriers to recruiting and retaining a diverse workforce and recommends means of removing any identified barriers. We have invited nationally-recognized speakers to the firm to discuss with us topics such as achieving work-life balance and diversity.
To attract diverse law student applicants to Tonkon Torp, we offer a fellowship
to a first-year law student who is a member of a racial or ethnic minority.
The fellowship provides the student selected with a first-year summer associate
position and, if the student returns to work at the firm during the summer
following his or her second year of law school, the student will receive a
$7,500 academic scholarship. (Please go to First-Year Diversity Fellowship Program for more information about this program.) We also
participate in local and regional minority job fairs, regularly support the
Oregon Minority Lawyers Association scholarship program, and have participated
in the Oregon State Bar First-Year Minority Internship Program.
Our commitment and innovation are paying off; diversity
is increasing among both our lawyers and staff, and we intend to build on
our success in these vital areas.