Biglaw Partner Slams Ranking For Not Including Enough Women

You can't just hope diversity works out.

onOctober 17, 2019 at 4:43 PMOctober 17, 2019 at 2:48 PM

If the legal profession is ever going to become meaningfully diverse, it has got to be everyone’s issue. Not just women or people of color, but everyone that wants a more diverse profession has to make it a priority.

That’s the attitude Mayer Brown partner Chris Arnold has. The capital markets and derivatives partner was recently placed on the Chambers UK 2020 ranking of solicitors as one of the best in the practice area. The only problem? He was one of 17 men on the list, with only one woman cracking the ranking. So Arnold took to social media (LinkedIn, because, lawyers, whatcha gonna do?) putting Chambers on blast for the lack of diversity in the rankings. He also attached an open letter (below) to Chambers asking that his name get pulled from the ranking and letting them know he wouldn’t be included until the list was at least 25 percent women.

As reported by Legal Cheek, Chambers has responded to the debacle and will, in the future, include diversity information in their rankings submissions:

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Chambers and Partners has also released a detailed statement on its diversity and inclusion work. CEO Tim Noble said that, looking over the past ten years worth of rankings, 30.6% of those featured at partner level in the UK were women.

He added that “Chambers will be requesting D&I-related information as part of the submissions process from the 2020/2021 research cycles and this data will now be assessed as part of the overall Chambers research and editorial. This will apply to all of our guides and include all strands of diversity”.

This is a super important lesson for the venerable ranking — you can’t just cross your fingers and hope diversity works out. It takes everyone working to see real results.

headshot Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).