Law firms, like other businesses, serve a client base that is increasingly nonwhite, making the business case for diversity even more urgent—and yet large firms have made little progress in increasing their number of lawyers of color.

Beverly Tatum, president emerita of Spelman College, said that 90% of the U.S. population was white in 1954, the year she was born, but by 2000, when today’s 20-year-olds were born, white people made up only 52% of the population.