When a federal judge ordered a remedy for the state of Maryland’s failure to properly invest in its historically black colleges and universities, Kirkland & Ellis partner Mike Jones won a personal and professional victory. 

Since 2009, Jones, an alumnus of Dillard University, a New Orleans-based HBCU, and his team had worked on the case, along with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. (The case was filed three years before that.) The plaintiffs, a group of alums from Maryland’s HBCUs, alleged the state maintained a vestige of the era of racial segregation by duplicating the HBCUs’ academic programs at traditionally majority white schools. That duplication, they said, diverted students of every race away from the HBCUs.