Biglaw

If A Biglaw Firm Falls In The Woods And No One Issues A Press Release About Its Lack Of Diversity...

This is an industry-wide problem... and it's time to shine the spotlight on the folks keeping quiet about it.

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Outlets like Above the Law don’t report on every Biglaw firm’s new partnership class. Usually, it’s a relatively mundane collection of rising stars that haven’t really made a name for themselves outside the four walls of their well-appointed offices. Beyond allowing everyone to keep tabs on their least favorite gunners, new partnership announcements rarely move the needle. Unfortunately, when it comes to partnership promotions, no news is usually good news.

And that’s exactly why firms with something to hide can sometimes slip one past the media by keeping their mouths shut. Like one firm downtown that hasn’t made any announcement of its new partners even though the firm historically puts out a press release like clockwork at the top of the new year. Last year’s installment — now conspicuously absent from the Internet — began “S&C has elected eight partners to the partnership effective January 1, 2018.”

We received a tip about S&C’s lack of public announcement way back on January 2. At the time, we hoped it was premature. A month and a half later, it’s clear that it wasn’t.

I don’t know if Sullivan & Cromwell elected a markedly non-diverse class of new partners. The fact of the matter is no one knows because the firm didn’t trumpet its new class as it has in years past. Even though we could likely reverse engineer this, that’s also not the point — the firm decided against drawing attention to its new partner class for the first time in a long time and given the negative press — some of it starting here — that Paul Weiss received over its partnership class, one has to wonder if the strategic decision was “keep quiet and hope no one notices.”

The uproar around the incoming partnership class at Paul Weiss highlighted this “market of ideas” failure in the media business — this reliance on transparency as a springboard to criticism that incentivizes others to recede into opacity. When Paul Weiss announced an almost entirely white male incoming class with a lone white woman to round out the class, the image the firm released — more so even than the promotions themselves — captured the diversity problem in Biglaw because someone along the way never thought an image like that could be anything but ordinary.

But precisely because this was Paul Weiss, the firm addressed the matter swiftly and set aside an opportunity to discuss what happened with the whole firm and have already taken steps to improve diversity through the lateral market.

While improving diversity in the legal profession is a task every firm needs to commit to with far more vigor, the attention heaped upon Paul Weiss always seemed a bit disproportionate. While the image captured the broad struggle across Biglaw, there are certainly firms doing far less to address improve diversity both firmwide and in particular in senior leadership positions. To some extent, Paul Weiss bore the brunt of an industry crisis because it happened to offer transparency. There’s not an easy way to see that, for example, Cravath has no black partners. Therefore Paul Weiss’s name gets associated with diversity struggles that it addresses better than many of its peer firms while those firms avoid the spotlight.

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This is an industry-wide problem and one that all firms need to redouble their efforts upon. Whenever we report on diversity in firms — both the successes and the failures — those of us covering the issue need to underscore for the readers that we’re only reporting on a slice of a wider crisis and that no success can be celebrated or failure lamented without grasping how it fits into the overarching diversity landscape.

Trees still make a sound when they fall no matter how cagey your press strategy.

Earlier: Paul Weiss Press Release Captures Everything Broken About Biglaw In One Image
Paul Weiss ‘Addresses’ Partnership Diversity Kerfuffle
Paul Weiss Launches Supreme Court Practice As Press Spotlight Returns To Partnership Diversity

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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