Biglaw, Minority Issues

Where's The Diversity In The New York City Legal Market?

Given NYC’s culture, demographics, and support for diversity, why does its legal market rank so low for women and minority partnership representation?

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“Sometimes I feel like my only friend / Is the city I live in, is beautiful Brooklyn.” – Mos Def

Last week, I wrote about the geographic markets with the highest percentage of women and minority partners in the legal profession. New York City’s legal market was noticeably absent from both these lists. According to the 2014-2015 NALP Directory of Legal Employers report, in 2014, women accounted for 18.9 percent of partners in the New York City’s major firms, and minorities accounted for 7.9 percent of the partners in these firms. Although New York City is one of the most diverse areas in the United States, its legal market is quite homogeneous. Why?

According to The American Lawyer’s MP McQueen, minorities and women continue to leave law firms in New York at a higher rate than white males. Despite increasing financial and staff resources devoted to improving diversity, the report found that minority representation slipped at all levels last year, and the attrition of women associates actually worsened a bit. The 2014 Diversity Benchmarking Report, a survey of 55 New York law firms among 118 who have signed on to the Statement of Diversity Principles, found that 23.6 percent of minority attorneys left their firms last year, and 21.3 percent of women, compared with just 14.7 percent of white men.

In 2010, the ABA Journal noted:

Recent NALP statistics showed a slight decline this year in law firm diversity, but a new study suggests that some firms are more to blame than others.

According to Building a Better Legal Profession, much of the decline can be attributed to about a quarter of firms that lost more minorities in percentage terms than whites, the National Law Journal reports. . . . The NLJ spoke to Stanford law professor Michele Dauber about the study. “It’s true that minorities did poorly industry-wide, but it looks to me like there are some bad actors in every market that dragged things down,” she said. “There are many, many firms that clearly worked to protect their minority associates. The amount of variation between firms surprised me.”

The study found attrition rates among minorities and women in California were generally lower than for many locations in the East Coast and in Southern states. . . . Above the Law also covered the findings.

According to New York City Bar Association’s Director of Diversity and Inclusion Gabrielle Brown, “[t]he attrition rates are rising. Minority and women attorneys are leaving their firms at a more steady rate than their white male counterparts. Any lack of progress is something we want to address with our firms because they are devoting resources to retention of minorities and women.”

McQueen further noted that women and minority partners are disproportionately made income partners rather than equity partners, a pattern that has been documented for a decade, and income partners were more likely to leave firms than equity partners. The turnover rate of income partners was more than double that of equity partners at 8.3 percent, compared with 4 percent last year.

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In the article “Minority Ranks at Large Firms Show Little Growth,” Regina Rodriguez, a litigation defense partner in the Denver office of Faegre Baker Daniels, tells McQueen that in private practice, partners get to choose the teams with which they work and share clients, and tend to choose people like themselves. That’s human nature, she says. This so-called affinity bias “is a very real phenomenon,” she says. “As a result, Big Law finds itself stuck in a pattern where, without women and diverse lawyers in leadership, we are less likely to promote women and diverse lawyers into leadership.”

New York City’s 2014 Diversity Benchmarking Report states, “[d]espite the reported emphasis on diversity support, the attrition of minority and women attorneys tells a different story.” Diversity and inclusion have a long way to go in markets like New York City, but at least organizations like the NYC Bar Association are tracking key metrics so we can begin to understand the problem.

Given NYC’s culture, demographics, and support for diversity, are you surprised its legal market ranks so low for women and minority partnership representation (at 30th and 11th, respectively)? Is it possible that New York City’s legal market faces unique challenges that inhibit diversity and inclusion? How would you resolve the issues that cause the leaky pipeline to partnership and leadership?

Earlier: The Top 10 Geographic Markets Where Women And Minorities Succeed In Making Partner

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Renwei Chung is a 2L at Southern Methodist University School of Law. He has an undergraduate degree from Michigan State University and an MBA from the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Golden Rule: How Income Inequality Will Ruin America (affiliate link). He has been randomly blogging about anything and everything at Live Your Truth since 2008. He was born in California, raised in Michigan, and lives in Texas. He has a yellow lab named Izza and enjoys old-school hip hop, the NBA and stand up paddleboarding (SUP). He is really interested in startups, entrepreneurship, and innovative technologies. You can contact Renwei by email at projectrenwei@gmail.com, follow him on Twitter (@renweichung), or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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