It’s not much, but it’s enough to make diversity advocates in the legal profession let out a collective “phew!” According to our latest Diversity Scorecard, in 2010 big firms increased their percentage of minority attorneys by 0.2 percent, to 13.9 percent. This small jump is noteworthy because it halts the dip seen last year, when law firm diversity dropped for the first time in the decade that we’ve collected these numbers [See One Step Back, March 2010].
“My first thought is relief,” says Fred Alvarez, an employment law partner at the top firm in the Scorecard, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. He is also the chair of the American Bar Association’s commission on racial and ethnic diversity. “It was significant to me that what had been a long, steady progress was reversing in 2009. I was hoping that [decrease] would just be a blip,” he says.
