In 2002 the City Bar and the Vance Center launched a fellowship program to bring young black lawyers from South Africa to New York to work for a year in law firms and corporate legal departments.

The idea for the fellowships was developed by Evan Davis, then president of the New York City Bar Association, after returning from a trip to that country. "I met many talented black lawyers who continued to face obstacles to gaining corporate practice experience even after the demise of apartheid," Mr. Davis said.

Applications for the fifth year of the program are now in and selection will soon begin. So far, nineteen lawyers from South Africa have participated in the program.  Ten New York law firms and the legal departments of five banking institutions have participated in the Program: Citigroup; Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton; Clifford Chance; Cravath, Swaine & Moore; Credit Suisse First Boston; Goldman Sachs; JP Morgan Chase; Kirkland & Ellis; Morgan Stanley; O'Melveny & Myers; Shearman & Sterling; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; Sullivan & Cromwell; and Weil, Gotshal & Manges.

Loretta Lynch, a partner at Hogan & Hartson and a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, believes that mentorship of young South African lawyers can help create change in South Africa.

"This program is going to leave footprints into the future," Lynch says. "It's also an intangible gift to a New York lawyer who wants to do public service by mentoring younger attorneys. But best of all, when I travel there and see these serious young people, I see what the country has accomplished in just a generation."

In addition to the mentorship they receive, participants in the program are able to build relationships in the New York, a major legal and financial center, and gain a more international foundation from which to provide leadership in the practice of law in South Africa.

For Mr. Davis, the benefits to firms participating in the program were many.  "Participation helps to promote a firm's constructive thinking about its own diversity and the ways in which to bring multiracial diversity to all levels of U.S. legal practice," Mr. Davis said.  

In South Africa, only 26% of attorneys are black or colored (of Indian descent), despite the fact that they make up 90.4% of the population.  Of them, only a small minority end up going into commercial practice and the majority of corporate firms remain white-led and white-owned.

The purpose of the South African Visiting Lawyer Program is to give the most promising young black and colored lawyers the skills and exposure to international commercial work that can make them more competitive in South Africa's largely white-owned business sector.

"It is crucial to a successful transformation of the legal profession in South Africa that black lawyers and law firms have the capacity to participate meaningfully in commercial practice," Mr. Davis said. "This is an area where New York firms can provide help."