Kim Rivera, Chief Legal Officer & General Counsel of HP, at the company’s Palo Alto offices. [Photo: Jeff Singer] Even as some general counsel of major U.S. corporations take a harder line with Big Law on diversity, the results of our Diversity Scorecard show that the proportion of minorities in large law firms continues to stagnate.
Minority lawyers working in Am Law 200 firms and NLJ 250 firms stood at just 15.6 percent in 2016, up from 15.0 percent in 2015. The percentage of minority partners among the firms also saw only incremental growth, up only 0.4 percentage points to reach 8.6 percent last year.
Trying to boost those percentages, especially in the partner ranks, general counsel at Facebook Inc., Hewlett-Packard and Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. have all announced in recent months initiatives that will require more diversity among their outside counsel—or put those firms at risk of losing fees.
Other diversity mandates have been pushed by corporate GCs for almost two decades, but improvement has been slow. In 2000 the Diversity Scorecard found that large U.S. law firms were 9.7 percent minority; almost 20 years later, that proportion has increased by just 6 percentage points. By contrast, the proportion of minorities in the United States increased about 13 percentage points from 2000 to 2015, according to data from the U.S. Census.
The small gains registered in this year’s Diversity Scorecard were not evenly distributed among different minority groups. Asian-American lawyers remain the best-represented minority group in large law firms, comprising 6.9 percent of Big Law lawyers, up from 6.7 percent in 2015. The proportion of Asian-American nonpartners increased by 0.2 percentage points to 9.9 percent. Asian-American partners also saw growth, up to 3.3 percent of all Big Law partners from 3.0 percent the year prior.
Credit: ALM
The total number of Hispanic attorneys increased by 0.2 percent to 3.7 percent. There were similar gains among partner and nonpartner ranks, to 2.6 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively.
Credit: ALM
However, there was no change in the total percentage of African-American attorneys across all levels. In 2016, as was the case in 2015, African-Americans comprised only 3.0 percent of Big Law attorneys: 3.9 percent of nonpartners and 1.9 percent of partners.
