A Stitch in Haste

Wal-Mart has informed the major law firms it hires — all 100 of them — that they must impose racial and gender quotas on the "relationship teams" it assigns to the mega-retailer:

The company's general counsel has told its top 100 law firms that at least one person of color and one woman must be among the top five relationship attorneys that handle its business.
...
[Wal-Mart's general counsel], whose department spends about $200 million a year on outside legal services, said he realized he had to do something when he saw that 82 of the top 100 relationship partners handling the company's business are white men.
...
Wal-Mart's new policy signals a growing determination by corporate legal departments to pressure outside counsel. It is no longer enough, the general counsel at the symposium said, to raise the numbers of women and minority lawyers in a firm's lower ranks if its upper echelons remain an exclusive club for white men.

Now I have long been a defender of Wal-Mart in other contexts (one example here), and as a private company they are of course entitled to spend their legal budgets as they see fit. But I wonder whether this new trend is the best approach.

All the classic arguments against reverse discrimination apply to Wal-Mart no less than they apply to government: better qualified candidates are unfairly passed over, those filling the quota — including those qualified for the job — may question their own achievements and status, discrimination is economically inefficient, and so on.

And in the special case of the legal profession, is it realistic to lament the "oppression" of female and minority lawyers? Just how "oppressed" can any lawyer at a top firm — minority, female or otherwise — truly be? (This was a key issue in the recent Supreme Court case Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), which upheld open-ended racial preferences, but not quotas, at the University of Michigan Law School.)

In the majority opinion of that case, Justice O'Connor [sic!] wrote the following:

We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.

I wonder what those 100 law firms will look like 25 years from now, and how much of the difference will be attributable to Wal-Mart and how much to general "progress."

POST SCRIPT: Oh, and why no "gay lawyer" quota?

UPDATE: Eh Nonymous of Unused and Probably Unusuable has a lengthy comment up. Make of it what you will -- I'm still trying to decpiher it.