On an autumn day in 2011, Chalon Clark got ready to go back to work. Back from her honeymoon, she put aside her colorful everyday clothes, chose one of the three types of suits she always wore (grey, blue or black), checked her then-straightened hair and mentally prepared to go back to her professional self. At the office, she stumbled upon her mentor and supervisor at the time, Rick Illmer, who took her aside for a quick word.
“I had a great time at your wedding!” said Illmer with a smile and talked about how fun it was to see a live Bahamian Junkanoo dance. Then he added, a bit more confidently, “And there was this wonderful girl — she danced and laughed, she had a great sense of style and charisma. Why don’t you bring her to work?”
If the last time you saw Clark was in 2011, you wouldn’t recognize her today.
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Clark is an equity partner at the Husch Blackwell law firm. If you are a lawyer, you know it is a BIG deal. Heck, if you aren’t, you also know.
“It’s what most people join a law firm to do,” Clark says when we finally meet for the first time, screen to screen. She’s set up her computer in her living room, where pictures of family vacations decorate the wall behind her. “Every firm has a different structure, some firms don’t differentiate between partner and equity partners, which we call two tracks,” she says. “There’s a fixed income track where you are entitled to a partnership and the equity partner who shares the firm’s profit as part of their pay.”
Clark was made a partner at Husch Blackwell in 2016, eight years after entering the firm, and it took five extra years of dedication and drive to be eligible to become an equity partner. “You have to be bringing enough revenue for the partners to want to share profit with you,” she says.
If you are a lawyer — and again, even if you aren’t — you probably also know there was an extra layer of challenges. Before becoming an equity partner at her firm, Clark was part of the 0.86% of partners at law firms nationwide who are Black women. Then, when she got promoted to equity partner in 2022, she shared that achievement with fewer than 100 Black women across the country, 0.006% of all attorneys in the U.S.
“One example of a systemic problem is that in order to bring business to a law firm, you need to know the general counsel of a company,” says Clark, “and some of us don’t have those kinds of connections and those kinds of people in our network.”
Clark says this achievement was the result of a 17-year-long journey. But in reality, it was much longer than that.
