The Top 10 Firms Where Minorities Succeed In Making Partner

The legal profession has a long way to go when it comes to diversity and inclusion, according to columnist Renwei Chung, but some firms are doing a great job of positively distinguishing themselves in these areas.

We got a foot in / Being good is good, that’ll get you Drew Gooden / But me, I want Jordan numbers, LeBron footing / Can’t guard me, Vince Lombardi, John Wooden.”J. Cole

It is no secret, law is the least diverse profession in the nation. Nationally, 92 to 94% of Biglaw partners are white. This disparity is even higher in some areas of the nation. I noted earlier this year that tech industry leaders are beginning to accept the diversity challenge and that law partners need to do the same. It is no longer good enough to say we value diversity and then systematically underrepresent women and minorities. Just last week, Time highlighted how women and minority job seekers battle bias in the hiring process.

On Tuesday, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg penned a letter discussing the importance of diversity and inclusion. Along with this letter, Facebook provided a video module that discussed the business case for diversity and inclusion. According to CEB, diverse and inclusive workforces demonstrate 12% more discretionary effort, 19% greater intent to stay, 57% more collaboration among teams, and 42% greater team commitment. We already know that the attrition rate among minority partners is more than double the rate of white partners. Why is this?

In May, The American Lawyer’s MP McQueen wrote an article titled “Minority Ranks at Large Firms Show Little Growth.” In this article, McQueen notes:

Minority representation at law firms at best has reached a plateau. No substantial increase in the overall percentage of minority lawyers has been measured since 2008, when the share reached 13.9 percent before falling in the recession and recovering in 2012. That is far below the approximately 37 percent of the population that are racial or ethnic minorities in the United States, according to the U.S. Census. Yet it marks some progress since 2000, when minorities overall accounted for just 9.7 percent of lawyers at the largest firms. . . . There were still 10 law firms [of the 220 firms surveyed], however, that reported no minority equity partners, and one reported no minority partners at all.

As I have previously mentioned, before and after the 2009 crisis, the legal industry seems to have maintained a real commitment to diversity at the rudimentary level. It is as lawyers progress in their careers that we see more disparity in the data. Some suggest that diversity and inclusion are separate focuses. Could the lack of “inclusion” be the primary factor for my 92% theorem? Perhaps Verna Meyers said it best when she stated, “Diversity is being asked to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance.” The legal industry still lags other professions in minority hiring. Does it want for inclusion as well?

As Brad Smith, Microsoft General Counsel & Executive Vice President (Legal and Corporate Affairs), emphasizes, “To better understand the situation, it helps to compare diversity in the legal profession to three other professions with broad education or licensing requirements: physicians and surgeons, financial managers, and accountants/auditors. Although the percentage of under-represented minorities in each of these professions lags behind the national workforce, the gap between the legal profession and these other professions has actually worsened over the past nine years.”

Sponsored

So how racially tolerant is the legal profession? Suffice it to say, diversity and inclusion have a long way to go in our profession. However, some firms are doing a great job of positively distinguishing themselves in these areas. According to The American Lawyer, here are the top 10 firms with the highest percentage of minority partners (with percentage of minority partners indicated parenthetically):

  1. Best Best & Krieger (20.0%)
  2. Munger, Tolles & Olson (19.8%)
  3. White & Case (18.3%)
  4. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (18%)
  5. Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy (17.7%)
  6. Irell & Manella (17.6%)
  7. Knobbe Martens (16.5%)
  8. Bowman and Brooke (16.2%)
  9. Shutts & Bowen (15.9%)
  10. Carlton Fields (14.9%)

Congratulations to these firms for their ongoing commitment to diversity and inclusion. In David Lat’s article, “The Best Law Firms for Diversity (2016),” he has done an excellent job of analyzing and discussing the data and metrics of the most diverse firms in the country. In his article, Lat points out that “[y]ou can’t change a law firm’s demographics overnight, which explains why firms with high ranks for diversity tend to keep those high ranks. In other words, law firms need to renew their commitment to diversity year after year; diversity problems don’t lend themselves to quick fixes.”

“Diversity is central to Facebook’s mission of creating a more open and connected world,” Sandberg wrote in Tuesday’s letter. “To reflect the diversity of the 1.4 billion people using our products, we need to have people with different backgrounds, races, genders and points of view working at Facebook. Diverse teams have better results, so this is not only the right thing to do – it’s also good for our business.”

It’s worth repeating, diversity produces better results and is good for business. But we shouldn’t require PowerPoint slides or mathematical models to convince us that a diverse workforce is more productive than a homogenous one. Simply put, promoting diversity in our profession is the right thing to do.

Sponsored

Diversity does not happen by accident. Diversity is not self-executing. The legal profession must strive to be more racially tolerant if it aspires to be as diverse as the country it serves.


Renwei Chung is the Diversity Columnist at Above the Law. You can contact Renwei by email at projectrenwei@gmail.com, follow him on Twitter (@renweichung), or connect with him on LinkedIn