LaTonya Honorable may be a judge in the Pulaski County Circuit Court today, but back when she was first starting law school, she had a hard time making the connections that would help get her there, particularly with other Black women.
“I didn’t come from a family of lawyers,” she said. “I just knew I wanted to be a lawyer, and so it was difficult for me to understand how important the networking was and making meaningful, lasting connections — not transactional connections, but real, meaningful connections.”
Honorable is a woman who seeks to encourage and empower with everything she does. If she comes into a space and does not encourage and empower, she said, she is not doing her job. With that spirit of service in mind, she co-founded Sistas-in-Law to provide other women of color with the support they need to start and grow their legal careers.
The organization began as a GroupMe messaging group focused on providing support, encouragement and resources to female lawyers of color. Around 2022, Honorable and Judge Cara Connors, who serves the 6th Judicial Circuit in Pulaski and Perry counties, decided to formalize the community by creating a nonprofit.
“I think that gets to the whole point of Sistas-in-Law,” Honorable said. “She’s my sista’, and she encouraged me. She was like, ‘You’ve got to do more than just this GroupMe. This is really good, but this could really be something more and something better.’”
The organization works to combat the underrepresentation of Black women in legal professions. In 2023, Black women accounted for less than 3 percent of all lawyers working at U.S. law firms, the Sistas-in-Law website states.
“I think there are several things that contribute to that,” Honorable said. “Black women have had struggles getting admitted into law school, and then there is the Bar passage rate. There’s also a certain element of really finding a place for Black women in law, and sometimes we just struggle to find our place. Some of us have even gone to other professions simply because it’s hard to find your place in this field.”
Black women often have limited opportunities for growth and are not promoted at large and midsize firms, she said.
“It starts to be kind of prohibitive in how you earn your living and just being in positions of leadership to be able to make a meaningful difference,” she added. “The higher up you look in firms, the less you see women of color. Seeing that barrier and seeing those challenges are just a couple of the reasons we knew this organization was important.”
One way Sistas-in-Law helps is by hosting networking events that not only allow women of color to make valuable connections but also provide a “whoosah moment” in which women can relax and enjoy the company of their peers, she said. “Whoosah” refers to a breathing exercise done by Martin Lawrence’s character in the 2003 film Bad Boys II.
“We just kind of chit-chat, and we talk about some of the things we’re experiencing in the workplace,” Honorable said. “As women, many of us are married or have families, and sometimes we need to step away from whatever our role is and our occupation in the legal field, in leadership and take a beat and tend to our own physical and mental health. So we try to provide opportunities for us to connect and just relax, as well as those opportunities to talk about leadership opportunities, networking opportunities, training opportunities.”
Sistas-in-Law also offers continuing legal education courses on topics ranging from diversity, equity and inclusion and voting rights to artificial intelligence and probate and estate planning. Honorable said the latter is for the members themselves as much as their clients.
“Sometimes we help other people get their business in order, but we don’t always have our own together,” she said. “We did that to make sure that not only are we teaching lawyers the best way to litigate these types of cases but also to say, ‘Listen, we are working on building a legacy within our own families. These are ways that you can do this and protect the legacy that you’re building and make sure that you’re leaving your legacy in a way that others can continue to make it live.’”
The CLE courses are usually low cost or free, she added, and many do not require that attendees be members to participate.
Perhaps the most impactful way the organization helps empower Black women in law is by providing scholarships to ensure more women have the opportunity to enter the legal field to begin with. Last year, Sistas-in-Law hosted the inaugural Warren Nance Scholarship Celebration to raise money for the scholarships, which it awarded in spring.
Sistas-in-Law hosted the inaugural Warren Nance Scholarship Celebration last year to raise money for scholarships.
(Photo provided by Sistas-in-Law)
The organization awarded more than $12,000 in scholarships the first year, Honorable added.
“We were really excited about that — really, really excited,” she said.
Dean Cynthia Nance
The event honored the namesakes of the scholarship, retired Judge Joyce Williams Warren and Cynthia Nance, dean of the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville. Warren was the first Black female judge in Arkansas and the first Black female graduate of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law, while Nance is the first woman and first person of color to lead the U of A School of Law.
Ret. Judge Joyce Williams Warren
Honorable said members of Sistas-in-Law recently attended Nance’s induction into the Arkansas Women’s Hall of Fame, of which Warren is also a member.
“Being able to expose women of color to those types of events where we’re elevating women in law and leadership is a part of what we are about,” she said. “It is the highlighting of those accomplishments and simply to say, ‘Look at her. We can do that too. You can do that too,’ and to create more of an opportunity for us to bring people up, to lift as we climb and to make sure that maybe we’re not the only individuals in the room, maybe we’re not the only women of color in the room, and we can start to invite more people into that room and diversify that room.”
This year, the event will honor retired Judge Alice Gray, who presided over the 6th Judicial Circuit from 1992 to 2022.
Ret. Judge Alice Gray
“Judge Gray has been such an inspiration in the state of Arkansas and abroad,” Honorable said. “When Black judges and Black women judges were first getting on the bench here in Pulaski County, she was one of the first ones, and she was on the bench for 30 years before she retired.”
Taking place Oct. 8 at the Harry R. Kendall Health and Science Center on the campus of Philander Smith University in Little Rock, this year’s event promises an evening of food and live music plus a comedic host as attendees reflect on the honoree’s legacy while helping support scholarships for up-and-coming legal professionals. AY Media Group is a sponsor of the event.
“I like to call it a hit it and quit it,” Honorable said. “It’s not going to be long and drawn out because we don’t believe in all that. We’re going to come in, get some good food, celebrate, raise some scholarship funds and get everyone on their merry way.”
She added that she hopes the event elevates the achievements of women of color in law and leadership to provide the next generation with inspiration, as well as financial support for their education.
“We hope it will serve as inspiration to the students but, also, to the community to say, ‘Yeah, let’s make sure we support women of color in our community. Let’s make sure we get behind this organization to continue to uplift women in law and leadership,’” she said.
That is important, she said, because Black women bring a unique perspective to the legal field.
“Let me tell you something — Black women know how to make things happen, and we know how to do it with whatever you give us to do it with,” she said. “I think that is one of the things that we want to highlight is when Black women are involved, things start to happen that may not otherwise have happened because, historically, that’s what we’ve been forced to do. It’s almost like we have this button on the inside of us that says, ‘OK, whatever you have, make it work with this.’”
Judges Cara Connors, left, and LaTonya Honorable
Once the organization is established in Arkansas, Honorable said she would like to open Sistas-in-Law chapters in other states, eventually becoming a national organization.
“It is definitely our intention to have Sistas-in-Law chapters in other states,” she said. “Once we really find our footing and figure out exactly the type of impact we want to make and, better said, how to make that impact, it is our hope to move into different states because we want other women of color to be able to take what we’ve built and use it in their community and tweak it and change it to fit the needs of their specific community.”
Feature photo by Jane Colclasure
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