When he graduated from Duquesne University Law School in 1996, Eric Cottle had every intention of leaving Pittsburgh to work in a more racially diverse community.

	Lake Fong, Post-Gazette Attorney Eric Cottle, a senior associate with Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, hopes Pittsburgh will continue to make strides toward becoming a more diverse place to work and live. Click photo for larger image.

But his wife, Christine, is from Pittsburgh, and they wanted to raise their two children here. So Cottle decided to stay, but not because he felt the city was especially comfortable for black professionals.

"If you go to other cities -- Philadelphia; Washington, D.C. -- you see minority professionals at every level of banking, business and law," said Cottle, 40, a Penn Hills resident and a senior associate with Kirkpatrick & Lockhart. "But here, they're a rarity."

All too often, young minority lawyers in Pittsburgh choose to move to other cities, said David Herring, dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

They "don't feel this is a welcoming community," Herring said, "and they're going to a place they feel is more welcoming."

Concerned that there are too few minority lawyers in the area, the Allegheny County Bar Association has mounted a major effort to increase their numbers.

Officials for the association, whose 6,500 members include about four out of every five local lawyers, said the effort was driven, in part, by survey data indicating that Pittsburgh lags behind the nation in the percentage of minority lawyers at large law firms.

Survey results released in November by the National Association for Law Placement, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, found that minorities made up 1.34 percent of partners in the Pittsburgh law firms surveyed, compared with 4.04 percent nationwide.

And 5.3 percent of associates -- senior and staff lawyers -- were minorities at local firms surveyed. The national figure was 14.63 percent.

Arthur Stroyd, president of the local bar association, called the statistics "discouraging" and added, "It is obvious that we all need to do a much better job in this area."

Earlier NALP surveys suggest that Pittsburgh has made little progress in boosting minority participation at large law firms, despite efforts to promote diversity which began more than a decade ago.

Officials believe the new diversity effort, based on model initiatives in other cities and endorsed by a wide range of leaders in the area's legal community, could be more successful.

"It's by far the most ambitious effort I've been associated with, and I've been involved 12 years," said Edward Diggs, president of the Homer S. Brown Law Association, a group of minority lawyers.

Dennis Archer, president of the American Bar Association, said similar efforts were taking place in communities around the nation.

They are spurred, in part, he said, by a Supreme Court decision last year that upheld a University of Michigan law school initiative to promote minority enrollment.

Racial and ethnic minorities are "woefully underrepresented" in the nation's legal community, said Archer, a former Detroit mayor and the bar association's first black president, noting that minorities make up about a third of the population but about 10 percent of licensed lawyers.

For years, many law firms simply did not make the hiring of minorities a priority, Diggs said. Yet increasingly, companies doing business with law firms want them to be more diverse, said David Blaner, executive director of the Allegheny County Bar Association.

"It's a global economy. We're not just dealing with Pittsburgh," Blaner said of local law practices. "Corporations have the ability to seek business from Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., law firms. They have a lot of choices."

The local bar association has taken its first step in implementing the initiative by hiring Eugene Harris, a former director of human resources and recruiting for U.S. Steel, as its diversity coordinator.

Harris began work last month and has a contract to provide part-time consulting services through June 30, though Blaner said funding was available to continue his services after that date.

Harris said he had been preparing a strategic plan that will be disclosed later this month. He has had input from local law firms, corporations, government agencies, the Duquesne and Pitt law schools, the Homer S. Brown association and the county bar association.

Blaner said some of the plan's provisions included:

Conducting a survey to assess the number of minority lawyers in agencies besides large law firms, including smaller law practices, government and the corporate sector. Participants would use the survey as a starting point to assess their progress in recruiting and retaining minorities.

Creating an internship program for local law school students to work part time in area law firms, and, it is hoped, develop relationships that lead to long-term employment.

Seeking additional money to provide financial aid to minorities who attend area law schools. Herring said such funding had been critical in helping the University of Pittsburgh law school to increase minority enrollment from 8 percent to 15 percent during the past several years.

Developing a mentor program that matches minority lawyers with senior law firm staff who can help them feel comfortable and identify career opportunities at the firm.

Preparing a "best practices" booklet to help firms identify strategies that have been successful in recruiting and retaining minorities.

In addition, the plan calls for expanding the number of minorities working in the legal profession who are not lawyers, in part by creating partnerships with schools or other agencies to help candidates develop skills.

Although it is not specifically included in the plan, the bar association also supports identifying minority lawyers interested in obtaining court appointments to represent defendants, association spokesman Tom Loftus said.

Bar association officials began discussions that resulted in the new diversity initiative about two years ago. Some aspects of the initiative are patterned after successful efforts in Columbus, Ohio, and Albany, N.Y.

The Columbus initiative helped to increase the number of minority lawyers at participating firms from 46 to 77 over a three-year period, said Carl Smallwood, a former president of the Columbus Bar Association.

Cottle, a member of the Allegheny County Bar Association's board of governors, said the local diversity effort would "help tremendously" in creating an atmosphere that welcomes minorities.

Most important to its success, he said, will be a sustained commitment from leaders in the legal community.

Cottle, a Brooklyn, N.Y., native, plans to do his part. A member of the hiring committee at his law firm, he tells minority lawyers they have the opportunity to stand out professionally in Allegheny County, and that the area has a lot to offer.

"Pittsburgh has an image around the nation as a blue-collar town, but it's not," Cottle said. "It's high-tech and starting to become more diverse. But that image is not being portrayed nationally.

"We're not that diverse yet," he acknowledged. "But all we can do is keep making strides."