Americans for Equal Opportunity has filed a charge of race discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) on behalf of three white members, alleging some of the nation’s largest law firms and the nonprofit that selected and placed summer interns with those legal giants unlawfully discriminated against white Americans in the name of diversity. The EEOC charge filed this morning accuses the Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO) and its 44 partners — some of the country’s most well-heeled law firms — with operating a summer law fellowship program in violation of Title VII.
Title VII is the federal statute which prohibits employers, as well as employment agencies, from discriminating in employment on the basis of race, sex, color, national origin, or religion. And the EEOC charge filed by Americans for Equal Opportunity, a recently formed membership organization dedicated to “promot[ing] and protect[ing] the right of the public to be free from discrimination on the basis of race,” details how SEO allegedly violated Title VII through its discriminatory law fellowship program.
To support its EEOC charge, Americans for Equal Opportunity, or AEO, points to SEO’s own words. “SEO is the nation’s premier summer internship and training program targeting talented African American, Hispanic and Native college students,” the nonprofit’s Form 990 from 2019 boasted, adding: “Each year, SEO Career recruits, interviews, selects and trains several hundred interns and fellows for partners in banking, law, alternative investment and corporate leadership … To date SEO has recruited over 8,900 interns for its U.S. Partners.” A few years earlier, “SEO held itself out to prospective Sponsor Firms as ‘the nation’s only summer internship program for pre-law students of color.’”
Those sponsor firms included a veritable “who’s who,” of the nation’s top law firms, with the EEOC charge identifying the 44 entities who partnered in the SEO Fellowship program. Under the fellowship program, the law firms allegedly paid “SEO to recruit and place SEO Fellows in summer internship programs” for law-school bound college graduates, branded “0L,” in contrast to law students called 1L, 2L, or 3L, based on their year in law school. As the charge notes, large law firms rarely offer “0L” programs outside the SEO Fellowship, and, in fact, only a few top law students even obtain internships as 1Ls.
According to the EEOC charge, the sponsor firms pay the SEO Fellows directly, first for two weeks’ training held at SEO’s headquarters and later for the summer internship at the firms, which last, at minimum, another eight weeks. The SEO Fellows allegedly receive a minimum of $1,600 per week, but some firms pay as much as $4,000 (or more) per week, compensating the non-law students at the same top rate 1L and 2L interns receive. Beyond the high compensation, SEO Fellows often receive offers to return as 1L interns the following summer — again an opportunity few first-year law students earn.
Because Title VII prohibits race discrimination by both employment agencies — which the EEOC charge alleges SEO operates as — as well as employers, both SEO and the 44 law firms participating in the program acted unlawfully, according to the charge. Here, the charge quotes at length from SEO material over the years which stressed the summer fellowship program is limited to persons of color.
The EEOC charge also highlights how SEO has become “coy … about its discriminatory intent,” over the years, changing “the language on its website to conceal its discriminatory practices, replacing the term ‘diverse’ with ‘underserved,’ and describing programs as open to ‘all.’” The SEO Fellowship, however, continues to screen out white applicants from the program, the charge claims. And the law firms, for their part, use the SEO Fellowship program, “to fulfill racial quotas by prioritizing the hiring candidates from preferred races or ethnicities,” AEO believes.
Monday’s filing of a race discrimination charge against SEO and the 44 collaborating law firms by a private membership organization representing individuals harmed by the allegedly unlawful employment practices casts in new light the Trump Administration’s targeting of DEI programs.
When the EEOC’s Acting Chair, Andrea Lucas, wrote 20 law firms in March 2025 requesting information about their DEI-related employment practices, including the SEO Fellowship, Trump critics framed the letter as the continued targeting of law firms the administration sees as its political opponents. At the time, the American Bar Association quoted “the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonprofit organization formed in 1963 at the request of President John F. Kennedy,” saying that “Lucas’ letters are not charges of discrimination. As such, they carry no more weight of authority than if they had been written on a cocktail napkin by any member of the public.”
The AEO’s charge of discrimination, brought on behalf of its members, cannot be so glibly dismissed. And with an official charge of discrimination filed against SEO and the law firms, the EEOC now has a statutory duty to investigate.
Given the detailed allegations contained in the AEO’s charge, and the previous race-based boasts of the SEO, it seems likely the investigation will reveal the SEO and law firms engaged in unlawful discrimination in violation of Title VII. If so, that evidence will vindicate Trump against charges his administration is targeting political enemies. Such evidence would also provide the public with a personal glimpse into the individuals injured by reverse discrimination. When asked whether the AEO would also be filing a lawsuit against the SEO and the law firms, AEO Board President Clegg Ivey told The Federalist, “[g]iven how brazen and obvious these Title VII violations are, we are optimistic that the EEOC will take action to enforce federal law.”
“If not, we are ready to take our case to federal court to protect the civil rights of our members and of all Americans,” Ivey stressed.
Margot Cleveland is an investigative journalist and legal analyst and serves as The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. Margot’s work has been published at The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the New Criterion, National Review Online, Townhall.com, the Daily Signal, USA Today, and the Detroit Free Press. She is also a regular guest on nationally syndicated radio programs and on Fox News, Fox Business, and Newsmax. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. Cleveland is also of counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland where you can read more about her greatest accomplishments—her dear husband and dear son. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
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