Ivory L. Bishop, Jr. ’15, is a senior associate at BakerHostetler, where he litigates white collar, securities class actions and antitrust cases, as well as other commercial litigation matters. He had to overcome many obstacles to get where he is today, but each obstacle strengthened him and pushed him closer to attaining his goals.
Background and Education
Bishop is a first-generation college graduate. “In the neighborhood I lived in, the only successful people I knew were either criminals or individuals in sports or music,” he says. He attended Five Towns College to become a sound engineer, thinking that was an “out of the box” career, but after working for several years he realized that there was an element in the industry that he didn’t want to be around. “I realized that I needed to go back to school,” he says. He took a business law class in a community college taught by an attorney who used the Socratic method. After being embarrassed the first time he was called on in class, Bishop rose to the occasion.
“I would show up two hours before class to study and then I would spend the whole class going back and forth with the professor,” he says. Eventually, that professor encouraged him to consider the law as a career. Bishop didn’t think he could afford law school, but his professor advised him to try for a scholarship. One of Bishop’s mentors (and a Hofstra Law alumna) was an LSAT tutor who offered to train him for the LSAT for five months for free. Bishop did well and received a scholarship to Hofstra Law.
“Law school was fascinating,” he says. “I loved reasoning and working out legal problems. The hardest part was feeling like I didn’t fit in. I was from a completely different world. I was in my late twenties, already married and had a child, and most of my classmates were much younger.”
“When I went to law school, I didn’t know any attorneys,” Bishop says. “Throughout my first year of law school, I still thought that all lawyers did everything. I didn’t realize that lawyers focused on different practice areas.” As a result, he didn’t have a specific legal career in mind. “I grew up in homeless shelters most of my life until I graduated from high school,” Bishop says. “I thought I would do youth advocacy originally.” But then he received a summer associate position at Proskauer on a corporate lawyer scholarship through the New York City Bar. “I couldn’t pass up the opportunity,” he explains.
At Proskauer, Bishop tried corporate work. “It was horrible,” he says. “I wanted to try some litigation assignments, even though I wasn’t a fan of research. I did an assignment for a partner who did white collar work and I loved it. It bridged the gap between criminal and business and litigation; it was a little bit of everything.”
During his 2L summer, Bishop worked at Arnold and Porter, focusing almost exclusively on white collar matters. The firm also was supportive of its lawyers taking judicial clerkships. “By the end of that summer, I knew I wanted to do white collar work and clerk,” he says.
One of the defining moments of Bishop’s career came when a minority lawyer he looked up to and hoped would be a mentor, discouraged him instead. “This person told me that because of where I went to college and law school, I would never get a clerkship, especially in the Eastern or Southern District, because those positions are too competitive. They suggested that I look somewhere no one else wants to be like North Dakota,” he says.
Bishop also aspired to work at the U.S. Attorney’s office and received similar comments from the same lawyer. “They told me to forget it with my pedigree,” he says. “But that experience fueled me. I came home and told my wife, ‘I will do it because this person said I can’t.’ I had already gotten a summer associate position at Proskauer. The idea that I couldn’t do that somewhere else rubbed me the wrong way.”
Clerkship Experience
Bishop worked at Arnold and Porter for a year after graduation before leaving the firm to clerk for Judge Theodore McKee, then Chief of Third Circuit Court of Appeals, and for Judge Sterling Johnson, Jr. at the Eastern District of New York.
Former Dean Eric Lane was instrumental in helping Bishop obtain his clerkships. “When I told him I was thinking about clerking, he stopped right away, took me to his office and started calling judges. Before I left the office, I had an interview with Judge Garaufis in the Eastern District.” Judge Garaufis did not have any positions available at that time but promised to pass off Bishop’s resume to other judges. “By the time I got back to Atlantic terminal, I had a missed call from Judge Johnson’s chambers,” he says.
Dean Lane had also made a call to Third Circuit Judge McKee, who called Bishop three days later. Bishop was interviewed and offered the job, and one day after receiving that offer, he interviewed with Judge Johnson, who also offered Bishop a job. “This all happened within first three weeks of third year,” Bishop says. “Both of my clerkships were lined up before I even started working at Arnold and Porter.”
Bishop graduated at the top of his law school class but always felt like an outsider until he started clerking. That was where he encountered more minorities as judges, assistant United States attorneys, clerks, and court personnel. “It was a space I could feel comfortable. I got to see that being intelligent, competent and a minority were not mutually exclusive,” he says.
In discussing his clerkship with the Third Circuit, Bishop says, “Clerking on the appeals court was very academic. The stakes were high, and the opinions were going to stand for a long time because it was unlikely that the Supreme Court would review more than a few of the cases,” he says. “But there were a lot of days at that clerkship that I felt helpless, as if the court had limited ability to help human beings. It’s very challenging working on the appeals court every day, because the judge cannot always do what they think is right – they have to convince the other judges on the panel to see things their way.”
Although he enjoyed his clerkship with the Third Circuit, Bishop says his experience in the Eastern District was what really turned him on to courtroom work. “At the Eastern District, there was a lot more interaction with people. Sitting for sentencings, watching trials, seeing victims, and hearing their impact statements had a real-life element that was raw. I felt like this was home.”
Making a Difference in the Courtroom
After his clerkships, Bishop knew he wanted to be in the courtroom. The only question was which part he would play. “I’ve always wanted to work at the U.S. Attorney’s office because it seemed that was where I would have the greatest ability to ensure the equitable exercise of the law,” he says. But after his clerkships, the difference in pay between a public sector position and the pay working for a private firm precluded Bishop from seeking work in the public sector immediately.
While clerking in the Eastern District, Bishop met the managing partner of BakerHostetler’s New York office at a going-away event for one of Bishop’s heroes, then-outgoing U.S. Attorney Robert Capers, and subsequently received an offer to work for Baker when his clerkship was over.
Now, as a senior associate at the firm, Bishop has an opportunity to do some good and bring in his own matters that he finds more meaningful. He represented an individual with a diminished immune system in a civil rights action against New York City about the City’s alleged non-compliance with Covid restrictions in a New York City jail and filed a class action on behalf of victims of police violence in Rochester, New York during the 2020 protests. “Cases with a human element help me get up in the morning. It’s important to go to the mat for these people,” he says.
Bishop also appreciates the larger white collar matters he handles, and he can relate to the families of many of his criminal clients as well because his father spent some time in prison. “It was devastating to see him in a cage and talked down to. It is important to me to minimize the damage to people’s families.”
“Having bigger cases allows me to take on smaller or pro bono cases,” he says. “I get opportunities to do good, but I also appreciate having to take large corporate matters and do everything in my power to get the best outcome, but we should use our privilege as attorneys to give back and try to help actual human beings on the ground level.”
Future Aspirations
Bishop never gave up on his aspirations to serve as an assistant United States attorney and recently accepted a position working for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. “It’s the perfect job,” he says. “It brings all of the best things of what I’ve done as a lawyer under one umbrella.” The increased courtroom experience is important to Bishop. “In the white collar and antitrust world, we do everything in our power to stay out of court. We try to resolve cases amicably at the investigation stage. But as an assistant U.S. Attorney, you are in court every day.”
“What most people don’t appreciate is that when you grow up in a poor environment, criminals are role models because they have decided to do something about their poverty. But their success is based off of hurting other people. Working in the U.S. Attorney’s office is an opportunity to be a part of removing those role models from the equation so the nurse, the plumber, or the lawyer can be the role model. Your job is to do good every day. That’s what I went to law school for – to make people’s lives better and to help human beings. Having the opportunity to do that in the district where I grew up – you can’t put a price tag on that,” he says.
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