If you’ve been paying attention to Biglaw trends, this is not a surprise. The growing trend of nonequity or income partners has long been seen as a kind of legal career limbo that lets firms tick off diversity boxes while not truly diversifying the top levels of the partnership. And now we’ve got some hard numbers that correspond to the trend many have seen.
American Lawyer has looked at five years worth of data at 148 firms that have this increasingly popular two-tiered structure. And that found that minority lawyers are being “promoted” to the nonequity ranks at triple the rate of white lawyers. Yikes.
That’s right, between 2014 and 2018, minority nonequity partners grew 34 percent compared with 10 percent growth for white nonequity partners. If you were a minority attorney you were also more likely to become a nonequity partner — 54 percent of minority partners were denied equity status. While white attorneys fared differently — they were more likely to become equity partners with 58 percent of them moving to the equity ranks.
While it is true the nonequity ranks at firms are growing in general — what better way to boost those profits per equity partner numbers, after all? The data shows a disturbing trend of minority lawyers being disproportionally impacted by the profit-driving trend. And, to be clear, it matters who is getting the nod to join the highest levels of law firms:
“Equity partners are the ones that have the power at a law firm. Who’s being hired, who’s getting choice work. They’re the ones that control the politics of the firm,” said Michelle Fang, chief legal officer at alternative rental car company Turo, who wrote an open letter in January signed by more than 200 general counsel demanding increased diversity in the legal profession.
As you might imagine, some firms were better than others when it comes to making minorities equity partner. American Lawyer specifically called out a handful of Am Law 100 firms for their “notable discrepancies in their minority and white nonequity partner representation,” which are: Proskauer Rose; Latham & Watkins; McDermott Will & Emery; Crowell & Moring; Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw; Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan; and Duane Morris.
Duane Morris’s diversity and inclusion officer, Joe West, blamed the firm’s lateral strategy as part of their issue:
“We’ve grown organically by following the business and by adding groups in subject matter and geographic areas that make sense for our strategy,” he said. “You have much less control, and that act alone could skew the numbers.”
Crowell & Moring’s management committee chair Philip Inglima pointed to larger systemic changes that need to happen to more meaningfully diversity leadership at the firm:
Both Duane Morris and Crowell & Moring say they are making systemic changes to try to get more minority lawyers on the equity track—overhauling their assignment systems to reduce bias and working with outside organizations such as Diversity Lab, for example.
“That kind of change is needed to overcome the effects of multiple generations of lawyers at firms like ours which had few diverse partners,” he said.
It’s certainly true that Biglaw has a long way to go.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).