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California's Biggest Law Firms Receive Poor Marks for Minority Hiring
The Recorder
June 05, 2007
The grades are in on workforce diversity, and if this were school, the state's largest law firms would barely be passing.
Berkeley's Greenlining Institute released a report card Thursday summarizing how the legal profession has fared in hiring and promoting attorneys of various ethnic backgrounds.
And the numbers are not encouraging.
The report comes in two parts, one highlighting the percentage of minority associates recently employed at each firm, the other showing the percentage of minority partners.
Each is broken down by race, so it becomes easy to see that Cooley Godward Kronish appears to employ no African-American partners, while Gordon & Rees; Jones Day; Sedgwick, Detert, Moran & Arnold; Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher; and DLA Piper each only employ one African-American partner. Accordingly, Greenlining gave those firms "D's" and "F's" in that category.
The only "A" in this category went to Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. The firm appears to employ three African-American partners out of 52 partners in California, or 5.76 percent (based on a curve, an "A" went to firms that had 5 percent or more of their partners in the category).
Allen Matkins Leck Gamble Mallory & Natsis; Sedgwick; and Gibson Dunn scraped the bottom with less than 1 percent of their total number of partners being Asian-American. They each received an "F-." In that category, the best grade went to Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. The firm appears to employ 136 partners in California, 14 of whom are Asian-American, or 10.29 percent.
A bit of hope for Allen Matkins, though; it appears to have the highest share of Latino associates, 9.4 percent, while Bingham McCutchen has the highest percentage of African-American associates, 6.91 percent.
Of the 20 firms surveyed, only three appear to employ at least one Native American partner, and only six have at least one Native American associate.
Whitty Somvichian, a partner in Cooley's litigation department, said part of the problem for the firm is that the pipeline is limited, and the outreach programs and diversity affairs the firm attends are not enough. "The challenge becomes, how do you go beyond the immediate recruiting efforts targeted at the law schools?" he said.
Skadden's Jose Allen, an African-American who has been a partner in the San Francisco office for 17 years, said Skadden was among the first firms to hire a full-time diversity manager. Despite its "A," Allen said, "We'd love to do better."
Greenlining's senior legal counsel Thalia Gonzalez, who pulled the numbers from a directory maintained by the legal employment nonprofit NALP, said firms have an uphill battle.
"I'm not making conclusions about who's doing a good job and who isn't doing a good job," Gonzalez said. "I think the data speaks for itself."
The numbers come straight from the firms themselves, and can be accessed online at the NALP directory. The report card is available under "publications" at www.greenlining.org.
