Biglaw

Numbers Are Up For Women In Biglaw, But Certain Minorities Continue To Fall Behind

As usual, we're forced to celebrate fractional progress for diversity and inclusion within Biglaw firms.

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By all accounts, it sure seemed like Biglaw firms were making an effort to focus on diversity and inclusion in 2018, but according to the latest law firm diversity report from the National Association of Law Placement (NALP), it looks like things didn’t exactly go as planned for a portion of the attorney population that law firms were trying so hard to accommodate and boost.

According to NALP Executive Director James Leipold, this year’s diversity report was a “good news/bad news story.” It’s easy to see what he means. First, the “good news”:

  • The number of women associates working in Biglaw firms has finally returned to — and surpassed — its pre-recession levels. From the report: “[R]epresentation of women finally saw a net increase in 2018. In 2018, the percentage of women stood at 45.91%, compared with 45.48% in 2017, and higher than the 2009 figure, but by just 0.25 percentage points.”
  • The percentage increase of minority Biglaw partners is the largest its ever been in the history of NALP recordkeeping. From the report: “In 2018 … minorities account[ed] for 9.13% of partners in the nation’s major firms, and women account[ed] for 23.36% of the partners in these firms, up from 8.42% and 22.70%, respectively, in 2017. An increase of about seven-tenths of a percentage point in representation of minorities among partners is noted as the largest over the entire span of NALP’s compilation of these figures.”
  • The number and percentage of LGBT lawyers (and summer associates) is the highest it’s ever been. From the report: “The overall percentage of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lawyers reported in 2018 increased to 2.86% compared with 2.64% in 2017. … The overall count in 2018 of 2,827 LGBT lawyers is up by just over 6% from 2017. … The overall figure for summer associates was 5.73%, compared with 4.66% in 2017.”

As usual, we’re forced to celebrate fractional progress for diversity and inclusion within Biglaw firms. Hooray? We get it: the Biglaw system wasn’t built in a day, and it’s going to take a while to fix all of its problems, but it’s about time that we try a little harder to to speed up the process. This brings us to the NALP report’s “bad news”:

  • Minority women remain the most poorly represented group in Biglaw partnerships. From the report: “[A]t just 3.19% of partners in 2018, minority women continue to be the most dramatically underrepresented group at the partnership level, a pattern that holds across all firm sizes and most jurisdictions.”
  • The number of black associates remains below pre-recession levels. From the report: “Despite small increases in the past three years, representation of Black/African-American associates remains just below its 2009 level of 4.66% and is now 4.48%.”

Biglaw firms continue to look monochromatic at the associate and partnership level, and there’s no real good reason for it. On the bright side, according to the report, minority representation among the ranks of summer associates is about 35 percent, up by nearly 3 percentage points since 2017. If law schools continue to enroll a diverse student body and these law students remain with their Biglaw firms, the number of black associates will someday rise and the number of minority women who attain join the partnerships at those firms will rise as well.

This may be the best we can hope for, but at least this presents some level of hope. Until that time comes, we’ll just continue to cheer for tiny year-over-year gains and pray that things get better. After all these years, it’s what we’ve been conditioned to do, and it’s really the only thing we can do. It’s depressing that it has to be this way.

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Despite Gains in Overall Representation of Women, Minorities, and LGBT Lawyers at Firms, Gains for Black/African-American Attorneys Lag [NALP]
2018 Report on Diversity in U.S. Law Firms [NALP]

Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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