Charles W Bender

Warren Christopher, whose name has become inexorably linked to police reform in Los Angeles, has announced that he will step aside as head of O'Melveny & Myers, the city's oldest and one of the country's most prestigious law firms. Christopher, 66, who has been chairman of the firm's management committee for 10 years, will continue to be a partner but will hand over the role of directing the firm to Charles W. Bender, currently its managing partner.

Warren Christopher, whose name has become inexorably linked to police reform in Los Angeles, has announced that he will step aside as head of O'Melveny & Myers, the city's oldest and one of the country's most prestigious law firms. Christopher, 66, who has been chairman of the firm's management committee for 10 years, will continue to be a partner but will hand over the role of directing the firm to Charles W. Bender, currently its managing partner.

A pattern of discrimination against Jews, blacks, Latinos and women marked the leading corporate law firms of Los Angeles for most of their history. Jews were the first to enter the mainstream of the legal profession in the mid-1950s, followed by the first significant numbers by women in the late 1960s and blacks a few years later. The first Latinos were hired in 1977. Among the firms confronted with increasing pressure to change anti-Jewish policies during the 1950s was O'Melveny & Myers.

In the lobby of the oldest law firm in Los Angeles hang a half-dozen silk-screen and woodblock prints by a leading Japanese artist--a sign of the legal world's growing interest in the treasures of the Orient. A more obvious indication of that interest, however, was a recent trip to Japan by Warren Christopher, who returned with government approval to open a small branch office for O'Melveny & Myers in Tokyo.