Biglaw

Women And Minorities Continue To Receive Short End Of The Stick In Biglaw And On The Bench

Do you think things will ever change?

By  
on

Previewing Santa Claus’s gift list this year, it looks like minority and women lawyers are still getting mainly coal in their Christmas stockings. (I wonder what Mrs. Claus thinks about that.)

According to a recent report by Major Lindsey & Africa, male partners earn 53 percent more than female partners at top U.S. law firms. Reasons: originations and hourly pay discrepancies. Is anyone surprised?

A friend of mine who has been a partner in Biglaw for years (she is also a dinosaur lawyer, although she would cringe at the term) recently had to arm wrestle another partner for origination credit based upon a matter she brought to the firm. No need to discuss the dispute’s details, but suffice it to say that she was not a happy camper.

Women who bring in the business should get the credit for bringing in the business and not have to engage in combat to get what is rightfully theirs. This was an example of “what’s yours is mine,” “you eat what you kill,” and other greedy phrases. The male partner jumped all over what was not his. Do you think things will ever change?

It’s hard enough for women to bring in and maintain a book of business without having an internal battle over it. And that doesn’t even begin to address the issue of client harassment in originating and retaining business.  I’ll save that topic for another time.

Santa’s stocking contains a mixed bag of news in the 2018 Vault/MCCA Diversity Survey. Major takeaways from this year’s report include:

  • “Law firms are bringing in more people of color but are less successful at retaining them.”
  • “Despite some clear advances for minority lawyers as a whole, progress is uneven among the different racial/ethnic groups.”
  • “Women are making greater inroads into partnership and leadership roles, but minority women enjoy fewer of these successes than their white colleagues.”
  • “Even with the gains recorded over the last decade, especially among new associates, demographic changes have been slow to trickle upward, as law firm partners remain overwhelmingly white and male.”

Sponsored

The report slices and dices numbers in a variety of different ways: minorities, women, women of color, and individual racial/ethnic groups. The last category includes Asian-Americans, Hispanic/Latinx, African-American/Black, multiracial, Alaska Native/American Indian, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, LGBTQ attorneys, lawyers with disabilities, and part-time attorneys.

Progress reported for minority lawyers who make it to partner is not much to cheer about.  The report says that “overall, the number of minority attorneys promoted to partner has grown over the last decade, from less than 13 percent in 2007 to more than 14 percent in 2018.”

Really? I hardly think that’s a statistic to be proud of. In other words, in more than a decade, the partner promotion of minority lawyers has barely budged. Lipstick on a pig, anyone?

While minority hiring is up (a good thing!), retention of minority attorneys in law firms is not. The report says that “racial minorities still represent a disproportionate — and growing — segment of the lawyers who leave their firms. Minority lawyers represented 17 percent of lawyers employed by firms in 2017 but 22 percent of the attorneys who left their firms. Among associates, that number climbed to 28 percent. These figures are the highest reported in 11 years, including during the peak of the recession, when minorities were hit particularly hard by layoffs.” Why stay with a firm when your opportunities for partner are lousy? Lawyers of color are still much less likely to be partners than white lawyers; 46 percent of white attorneys are partners, compared to 24 percent of minority attorneys.

There should be no surprise that minority lawyers leave. Remember that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

Sponsored

What about women lawyers? The report says that women make up more than 46 percent of law firm associates and 23 percent of all partners, and for the first time in the 14 years of data collection, the percentage of women equity partners now exceeds 20 percent. So, you have women partners making up 23 percent of all partners, and of that 23 percent, women equity partners are 20 percent. Is my math correct? If it is, then I don’t think that’s anything to write home about.

Meanwhile, the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court, Tani Cantil-Sakauye, a female and ethnic minority, has changed her voter registration from Republican to “no party preference.” Most of the stories about her decision have, I think, left out several important points that she made when she discussed her decision. It wasn’t merely watching her party’s antics during the Kavanaugh confirmation.

The Chief, who is the first Filipina-American to sit on the state’s high court and only the second female Chief Justice in California, saw the hearings not just as the Chief, but as a female and a mother of two young women. Like many other women in this country she was distressed by the partisan tone of those hearings.

The Chief’s decision is much less controversial than any (and every) decision made by California’s first female chief justice. Governor Edmund G. Brown, then in his first go-around as governor, appointed Rose Elizabeth Bird in 1977. I wonder how many California dinosaur lawyers even remember her, except perhaps how she was excoriated for just about everything she did or did not do. Until her appointment to the Court, it had been the exclusive province of white males.

Her leadership (or lack thereof by some reckonings) and her persistent unwillingness to uphold any death penalty conviction led to a contentious retention battle in 1986. The result: the tossing out not only of her, but also two associate justices also seen as liberal, one of whom was Hispanic and both of whom were collateral damage.

That retention election foreshadowed politicization of the courts and today’s fierce partisan battles, just like the recent one that has left such a bad taste in the current Chief Justice’s mouth.

old lady lawyer elderly woman grandmother grandma laptop computerJill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for more than 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.

Topics

, , , , ,