Ivie, McNeill, Wyatt, Purcell & Diggs

Litigation and Transactional Law

Los Angeles

It was a different time, Rickey Ivie said, when a former Los Angeles police lieutenant named Earl C. Broady founded his law practice in 1943. African-Americans couldn't join the Los Angeles Bar Association back then. They didn't live on the West Side due to restrictive covenants. There were black-only schools and black-only neighborhoods. And law firms?

"The African-American lawyer was a rugged individualist," Ivie said. "We didn't have structured firms like Gibson Dunn or O'Melveny & Myers. They're over 100 years old. It takes a minute to become a huge law firm."

Broady eventually sold the business to Charles R. Scarlett and Robert L. Robertson Jr. when he became a Superior Court judge in the 60's. Likewise, when Scarlett and Robertson joined the bench, they sold the firm to Ivie and Robert H. McNeill.

But Ivie and McNeill wanted more than a small, two-man practice. They wanted to grow their team and expand into different practice areas. They wanted to reach a level of institution that enables them to say they're the largest black-owned law firm in California, a claim they now boast with more than 45 employees, including attorneys and support staff.

But 76 years after Broady first hung his shingle, it's not the accomplishments that Ivie relishes.

"What's made our transition so important historically is that we're a second-soon-to-be-a-third generation of practitioners in this firm," he said. "That's what gives the firm depth and establishes a firm's culture and identity and purpose."

Ivie looks to the firm's younger partners, in particular Rodney S. Diggs, Byron Michael Purcell and Marie B. Maurice, who continue to push the business forward. Diggs has built out the firm's employment and civil rights practices. This past March, he won a $9 million award for the family of Sinuon Pream, a 37-year-old woman fatally shot by Long Beach police in early 2017. Estate of Sinuon Samantha Pream v. City of Long Beach, 17-CV04295 (C.D. Cal., filed Jane 17, 2018).

Meanwhile, Purcell and Maurice have expanded the firm's scope into transactional and regulatory matters for the likes of Netflix Inc., Hertz, Bank of America and AT&T.

"We expanded the base of what we do for our corporate clients," said Purcell, who became a partner in 2001.

They plan to continue the expansion, with plans to open new branches -- one recently opened on Crenshaw Boulevard -- and work with more international clients. But at its core, the mission remains the same, said W. Keith Wyatt, who joined the firm in 1981 and became a partner a decade later.

"We want to provide excellent legal services to a diverse group of clients and serve the community as best we can," he said.

-- Glenn Jeffers