Minority lawyers disproportionately occupy the nonequity partnership tier of the nation’s largest-grossing law firms compared to their white colleagues.

An American Lawyer analysis of 148 firms with two-tiered partnership structures, 131 of which ranked in this year’s Am Law 200, shows that minority lawyers are not only more likely to have nonequity partnership status, but that they are moving into the nonequity tier at triple the rate of white lawyers. The analysis is based on five years of survey data.