LAW WEEK: What has APABA been doing this year? And what are your goals as president?
NICOAL SPERRAZZA: Last year, our past president Justin Cohen did a really great job of kind of getting APABA back on track with making sure that we were holding a membership get-together and researching the passion of APABA within our members, and he was very successful at that. The banquet was incredible, the attendance was great, I think we got a lot of great feedback from our members that they felt a lot more engaged which was more or less his goal to do.
What I’ve been doing this year is, I obviously want to further membership engagement. But I also want to take care of other things that may have been overlooked over the years. One of them is a budget. We realized that we were just kind of flying by the seat of our pants, not necessarily budgeting the funds that we do have. And it is kind of difficult because there is obviously a limited number of Asian-American attorneys in the Denver area.
We really did want to look at the numbers and be able to budget for the future and to make sure that we’re providing benefits to our members that we want to this year. We had our fall annual picnic, which was great, we have the National Asian Pacific Bar convention coming up.
We also did help co-sponsor a recent attorney general debate, which was an amazing success. That effort was spearheaded by the Colorado Bar Association and the Women’s Bar Association so that was great.
Then looking forward to next year, we have our banquet coming up in April. We’re looking to shake it up a little bit so we’re pretty excited about that.
LAW WEEK: Are there any main agenda items or issues that you’re looking to address in 2019? Anything you’re getting involved in in the community?
SPERRAZZA: So APABA has two branches. There’s the Asian Pacific American Bar Association, and then we also have the giving arm which is the foundation, so every year the banquet benefits the foundation.
They do a lot of charitable contributions. They do a lot of grants, including to law students. I know that one of the organizations that they do also give grants to is the Asian Pacific Development Center.
Over the holidays, we’ve done a food drive, a basket drive and things like that for the Asian Pacific Development Center as well, because they provide a lot of resources for immigrants.
LAW WEEK: What are some of the issues that you see as important for improving diversity and inclusiveness, either specifically in your community or larger?
SPERRAZZA: I feel like [that’s a question] that APABA gets pretty often. What can law firms do, what can people do to increase diversity in the legal community? I don’t know if I have an answer to that.
I know that everybody has recognized that it’s a pipeline issue, that they really want to encourage and be a part of promoting the legal profession in young adults and teenagers.
With APABA specifically, our biggest event is the banquet. We always do appreciate sponsors and attendance at that because really, that’s our cornerstone event how we’re able to reconnect with a lot of the community. The banquet pulls attorneys and judges and legal professionals from every walk of life and every practice. So it’s really great to not just have an APABA membership event, but to have the entire legal community come out and support us. That means a lot. We really appreciate the people that take the time and the money to come out for the banquet every year.
LAW WEEK: As you said, you don’t have the answer for how to improve diversity and inclusiveness. I don’t think anybody does. Is there anything that you think you’d like to see different, from law firms or within the bar associations?
SPERRAZZA To be honest, I think for example, with implicit bias trainings, it’s hard because I feel like a lot of times the people who voluntarily attend diversity events are the ones who are more or less inclusive or open to being inclusive.
And I think that it’s hard because sometimes the people who maybe don’t think about diversity or inclusion as much are the ones who aren’t attending and not taking the training on implicit bias or things of that nature. So I think that’s kind of a tough line to walk.
For example, at [a recent seminar], one of the attendees had a question about how to deal with BigLaw firms. She was a solo practitioner, and she was having issues with getting returned phone calls and trying to confer with opposing counsel and all of these things, and [an attendee] did bring up that it’s probably not just this big town-small town type of mentality, but it’s also in part because she was a female.
Even with me, and one of my positions in a law firm, I felt excluded not just because I was a female, but also because I was Asian. And I understood why a lot of the firms that do have successful diversity and inclusion efforts that have minority or diverse attorneys there typically have more than one.
I know that there are some firms that, when you do see a lot of diverse faces there, it’s typically more than one individual or two individuals. It’s a few, and I can see why that happened. Because it’s a place where you are free to be yourself. Like, if I feel like bringing kimchi with my lunch, I can do that.
LAW WEEK: As you said, if you’re having these diversity or inclusion types of events, a lot of people who are going to pay attention to them in the first place, are already thinking about it. Is there anything you would say, maybe you should be thinking about it if you’re not thinking about implicit bias already?
SPERRAZZA I’m a part of the executive council for the Minoru Yasui Inn of Court, as well. We did a panel on diversity and inclusiveness, and one of our members got up and said something to the effect of I don’t understand why diverse people should be able to get a free pass or an additional benefit that I didn’t get. And that was a really hard pill to swallow.
Obviously, there are people who think that way. I do feel like when I was in law school, there were some people who felt that exact same way like, why just because I wasn’t born diverse, why should I not be able to apply for this program? In my mind, the Pledge to Diversity is to promote the fact that what comes with diversity is also a diversity of thought, and a diversity of experiences.
At the end of the day, two minds are better than one. Two different minds are arguably better than one, too, because they bring to the table different experiences, different thought processes, different ideas based on the life that they’ve lived. And I feel like that’s the effort behind diversity, right?
And the other piece of the effort behind diversity too, is that we want our legal profession to be somewhat hopefully reflective of the community that we serve, and the community that we serve, is not just white male or white female, or, you know, one sector over the other.
What interested me was when the speaker got up and said that, I don’t understand why diverse people should be able to get a leg up over the rest of us, it really made me think a little bit.
One of the things that I thought of was when I started working in a small law firm, I also expanded to family law.
And I also started doing some litigation cases that were for individuals and not corporations, and [saw the importance of] understanding the dynamics between cultures and the Asian cultures.
Maybe why people don’t have their money with the banks. Maybe why people don’t have ledgers and registers of all the money that comes in and out.
Having that understanding of the cultural basis of their actions or the way they operate, or even the way that they talk and communicate blew my mind because I’m a first generation Korean-American, my mom doesn’t have great English skills and that really translates a lot to being able to identify and understand and communicate with my clients now that weren’t a big corporation that had the huge payroll.
When you have clients that don’t come from first-world countries, it’s different. It not only helps to see somebody familiar, but it also helps to know that you have somebody who can understand where you’re coming from and what you’ve been through. Maybe not exactly what you’ve been through but to be able to kind of identify more with how you communicate, how you operate and why you do the things that you do the way that you do them.
— Tony Flesor