On aggregate, South Florida’s legal community is vibrantly diverse. Law schools at Florida International University and the University of Miami consistently rank near the top of national law school diversity rankings, and the region’s biggest homegrown firms have frequently appeared in the top quarter of the American Lawyer’s annual Diversity Scorecard. 

Yet, when the American Lawyer revamped its Diversity Scorecard this year to give more weight to diversity across all races and ethnicities—giving less weight to firms that lacked diversity in leadership or lacked lawyers of individual races and ethnicities—most Florida-native firms fell down the list.