If medicine looked like Big Law, you’d likely never encounter a black doctor in your life. If academia resembled Big Law, you’d find a few black nontenured professors, but virtually no black tenured professors. And if the cover of a magazine tried to capture the complexion of Big Law, you’d get this month’s issue of The American Lawyer.
Who are all those folks on our cover? They’re every lawyer whose photo we featured in a year’s time, from May 2013 to April 2014, in our monthly Big Deals and Big Suits columns. That is, they led the hottest, most significant and most lucrative work in the nation’s top law firms. (We ask firms to send us photos of the movers and shakers in those deals—often telling them to bias their photo selections toward key women and minority players.) The photo tally: 112 men, 19 women. (Some lucky lawyers appear more than once if they led multiple deals or suits.) And just three are black—or a little more than 2 percent.
