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.
“I wanted to be a lawyer since I knew I wanted to be a judge when I was 9 years old,” says Clark. “And I’ve always been on track.”
Clark drew inspiration from various sources in her life, but one that stood out was the award-winning documentary Eyes on the Prize. “There was Martin Luther King at the front lines doing the marches and Rosa Parks and all these people doing their different parts,” she says. “But what truly moved the needle for me were the lawyers.” Particularly the lawsuits brought by Thurgood Marshall when he was part of the NAACP’s legal staff, before he was appointed as a justice of the Supreme Court.
Author Mark Tushnet argued in The NAACP Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education that in the late 1940s, after a decade of litigation, the organization was looking for test cases to bring up to the Supreme Court to continue challenging Jim Crow laws. Between the late ’40s and early ’50s, Marshall and his colleagues drafted a strategy focused on taking up cases on behalf of university students and degreed professionals against institutions, which paved the way for the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education. “I thought, ‘Well that’s the difference that I want to make, that’s what I want to do,’” Clark recalls. One of those test cases was against the University of Texas School of Law, which was then forced to accept qualified Black students. Clark would end up applying to that same law school some fifty years later.
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“I was shocked that I was able to get in,” says Clark, who was admitted to UT School of Law in 2003. She is not just the only lawyer in her family, she’s also the first college graduate. “I had a kind of identity crisis going there because I was used to being the smartest girl in the room, and if not the smartest girl, I was definitely the smartest Black girl in the room.” But in law school, smarts will only get you so far.
In Clark’s 525-student class, there were third- and fourth-generation lawyers, people who grew up listening to legal conversations over the family table. “The words they were using in the classroom, I felt like I was hearing another language,” she recalls with a chuckle. She remembers how surprised she was to find out that one of her classmates was the granddaughter of the former dean the school was named after.
Right away, Clark realized she had some catching up to do.
So what Clark did was get to work: she applied for federal clerkships and asked professors for recommendation letters. She got five of them, and with those, she got an offer to work for a federal judge on the spot. “Unheard of!” she says, smiling at the memory as if she can’t believe it still. But while the letters didn’t hurt, there was one recommendation Clark did not ask for and did not know she had received.
Shortly after getting the job, a freshly graduated Chalon Clark was clearing her new desk at the judge’s office when she found a hefty stack of papers: 765 resumes of people from all the top schools in the country — Harvard, Yale, University of Texas — and among them was her own. But why was she chosen? “A clerk told me they were trying to reach out to anyone who knew me and ended up calling a guy whose locker was next to mine,” she says. “And for a couple of years, every time we met at the lockers, I would say hello and check in with him.” He told them she was a kind and nice person. “I found out that having the credentials, good grades, going to the best schools, that was table stakes.” Due to the judge’s advanced age, his staff was looking for someone who could be patient, kind and a self-starter. “I remember thinking, ‘You never know who will vouch for you,’” she says. “It made me realize the power of relationships.”
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If working for the court made Clark realize the importance of relationships, corporate law taught her that that’s what it’s all about. “Sometimes, I would ask partners at the firm how they got their business, and the responses that I got were, ‘Oh, this is my college buddy, we were roommates,’ or, ‘Oh, that’s my dad’s friend,’ or, ‘Oh, that’s my neighbor.’ I didn’t have those neighbors, and my dad didn’t have those friends,” she says. “And that’s the story for many minorities.”
There is a special type of client in corporate firms, called institutional clients. These are large accounts that bring a big book of business along with them and that have been with the firm for a long time. Understandably, not everyone has access to them. “The way you get credit for them is very political,” explains Clark matter-of-factly. “If you don’t have a mentor willing to groom you to take over that portion of the business and get credit for it, there are not many ways to get in.”
To Clark, the path seemed clear, all she had to do was to belong, right at the place where she felt she didn’t.
“If it’s all about relationships and having someone who is going to invest in you and recommend you within the firm, they have to know you,” says Clark.
And early on in her career, not a lot of people did know her.
During her first years working at Husch Blackwell, Chalon struggled with the impossible task of belonging by hiding. “I was a model minority — always bringing the most sterile, serious, no-nonsense version of myself to work, believing that would show everyone that I was capable, competent and belonged,” says Clark, looking back. “I was always declining lunchtime or happy hour invites because the last thing I wanted to do in my recharge time was to put on my mask again.” The most important thing was making people feel comfortable around her. “I was constantly code-switching — I spoke in a completely different voice and tone, avoiding any slang or common phrases or talking about important issues in my culture for fear people wouldn’t understand. I wore things that I truly didn’t like just so I wouldn’t stand out.”
But not standing out has its own perils. “The meritocracy myth tells you that if you keep your head down and do your work, someone is going to notice, and that’s just not going to happen,” says Clark. “If people don’t know you, they can’t promote you.”
While the chat with Illmer in 2011 was the first step in breaking free from her self-imposed constraints at work, by that time, Clark was already working on building relationships for herself and others. “I have a lot of female friends and Black female friends who are lawyers, some are in-house now, some are in decision-making roles in HR, and they are a big part of how I was made equity partner — they were the ones willing to give me business.”
And she didn’t stop at close-knit relationships. After taking the role of chair for the Dallas Association of Black Women Attorneys for two years in 2011 and 2012, she co-founded the NEW Roundtable, a nonprofit organization started by Chasity Wilson Henry, the deputy general counsel and vice president of Jacobs, in 2014. The group started with meetings between a handful of University of Texas School of Law alumnae, then grew to become a space dedicated to the encouragement and development of its members’ careers.
“When we started this group, we were working at law firms, feeling like we didn’t have a direction,” says Clark. “Some people felt like they didn’t have the scores, some people felt like they didn’t know what they were doing or how long they’d stay at the firm.” They felt like they were not finding the support they needed. “There really weren’t many other Black women older than us who could help us through — that’s when we realized there was power in our peers. So we decided to just support each other.”
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Almost a decade later, the NEW Roundtable has close to 100 members who boost each other’s careers by facilitating job opportunities, business referrals and professional awards. And they’re making waves. The Podium, a nonprofit organization of Asian American women lawyers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, reached out to the group to build their organization on the NEW Roundtable model.
Clark considers 2021 to have been her breakout year. After a long transformation (which is still ongoing), Clark was able to merge “the two Chalons,” as she puts it. “I allowed myself to add my colleagues and co-workers on my social media sites, invite them to my home and my restaurants and share personal stories.” And that process brought new opportunities.
In 2009, after a disastrous but well-intentioned birthday lunch at a Jamaican restaurant, Clark’s husband, Richard Thomas, decided to show Dallas what real Jamaican cuisine was all about. Soon after, the couple opened their first restaurant, The Island Spot, and Clark was in charge of decorating it. “He gave me $500 and told me I was the interior decorator,” recalls Clark. And that was the first official interior decoration job she took.
A couple of years later, Thomas proposed an even bigger project: remodeling and flipping a house. “At the end of the project, the realtor we hired asked who the designer was and tried to hire me for staging,” she laughs. “I repeatedly turned it down, thinking I’m not a designer, I’m just a lawyer!”
Over the years, Clark would take up more and more personal projects. “Guests would always come over and ask who our designer was and then ask me to do their homes, and I repeatedly turned them down.” But when the pandemic struck, Clark had a little more time to think and contemplate other possibilities for her life. “Looking back, I realized that I had two restaurants and four homes in my portfolio — so maybe I was more than ‘just a lawyer.’”
In 2021, she opened Your Design Redefined. “At first, I was trying to hide my design side from my law side,” says Clark, laughing at the memory. “One time, a lady found me on Instagram and we worked on a whole interior design project together before we realized her company was a client in our law firm!” And that just kept happening; people found Clark to help them with a design plan, only to find out they were also women lawyers. “When I started merging the two worlds, I was very surprised at the synergies it created.”
With three kids, an interior design career, a career as a lawyer and a hospitality business she built with her husband — I just had to ask, how does she do it? “When people ask me how do I juggle, I just tell them the truth: I don’t. My husband gave me this analogy, although it might not be his: when you’re juggling balls, some are rubber and some are glass.”
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Clark got her equity partner status in 2022, and since then, people have been reaching out to her for advice. “Every Friday from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m., I respond to all the strangers from all over the country who’ve seen me on LinkedIn and reached out to me,” she says. Clark sees it as a way of giving back. She takes calls with people’s bosses and associates and tries to bring forward the message that you too can build what she has.
“I always said, once I get here, I’m just going to be available and I’m going to be vulnerable and I’m going to tell people the truth. So I hope that’s what people see in me.”