Porzio, Bromberg & Newman of Morristown, N.J., has announced that it has formed a strategic alliance with Newark, N.J.'s Love and Long, whose three lawyers are African-Americans.

The relationship is designed to serve Porzio corporate clients who require a certain minimal level of minority staffing and at the same time will provide Love and Long with the added resources it needs to tackle larger cases, both transactions and litigations, the firms say.

Love and Long, which also has a Philadelphia office, will remain a separate firm but will join Porzio on client proposals.

Love and Long is a certified member of the National Minority Supplier Development Council, making it eligible for work from companies like Walmart and DuPont that make a point of giving some of their work to minority-owned firms. The terms of the certification allow Love and Long to subcontract some of that work.

"Some clients go to the extent of keeping track of the amount of time that's spent on their cases [by minority lawyers], "says Porzio managing partner D. Jeffrey Campbell. "In those circumstances, we can put together a team of Porzio and Love and Long attorneys that meets that requirement."

The joint venture is the product of a year-long search. Early last year, Porzio's diversity manager, Renee Davis, and partner Christopher DePhillips began looking for a woman- or minority-owned linkage partner that would make a good fit, says Campbell.

Love and Long was chosen because its real estate and corporate transactional practice was seen as overlapping Porzio's own practice, DePhillips says.

Lisa Love, managing partner of Love and Long, says the firm had no prior dealings with Porzio when the two firms' principals got together for lunch last July. But internally, she and partner Reginald Long had discussed a strategic alliance as a way to compete with larger competitors for work.

"When a general counsel is making a decision who he is going to hire for outside counsel, I think [an alliance] makes the picture more appealing for us in terms of staffing," Love says.

The two firms signed an open-ended, "not very painstaking" memorandum of understanding concerning their alliance, says DePhillips.

Where Porzio Bromberg and Love and Long attorneys work together on a case, clients can receive one joint bill or separate bills from each firm, according to preference, he says.

Campbell says he envisions cross-referrals between the two firms and hopes his firm's own young, minority lawyers will see the Love and Long lawyers as mentors and role models.

Porzio Bromberg is following the path of other large New Jersey firms that have worked to achieve diversity by joint ventures with minority-owned firms.

Last September, McCarter & English of Newark entered into a strategic alliance with Chicago's Pugh Jones Johnson & Quandt. Morristown's Day Pitney did likewise in April of 2007 when it joined forces with Gray Haile, a minority-owned corporate law boutique based in Washington, D.C.

Another Morristown firm, McElroy, Deutsch, Mulvaney & Carpenter, went a step further in May of 2007 when it bought a 49 percent stake in another minority-owned firm, Espinosa & Espinosa in Weehawken.

Joel Rose, a law firm management consultant in Cherry Hill, N.J., says the forces driving such alliances are hard to resist. "There is a tremendous pressure placed on these firms by their corporate clients to ensure there is a certain level of diversity in the law firm's complement of lawyers," he says.

Generally, these alliances succeed. "In most cases, they do work because the clients are satisfied, the work is performed in a highly professional manner, and the attorneys in the minority firm are compensated well. It can be a win-win situation," Rose says.