ABA study finds minority lawyers have ‘miles to go’ in the profession
By Nancy McCarthy
Staff Writer
Minority attorneys continue to face serious obstacles to success in the legal
profession, from initial job opportunities to career advancement, and they remain
grossly underrepresented in top-level private sector jobs, according to a report
issued last month by an American Bar Association commission.
Miles to Go: Progress of Minorities in the Legal Profession also reported
these findings:
- Although African-Americans are the best-represented group among minority
lawyers nationwide (3.9 percent of attorneys and 8.8 percent of judges), their
pace of entry into the profession has slowed and the number of black law students
has fallen to a 12-year low.
- Progress for minority women lawyers has been particularly slow, and despite
their growing numbers (44 percent of all minority lawyers in 2000), they are
almost completely excluded from top private sector jobs and have a higher
law firm attrition rate than any other group.
- Minorities in law firms do not have the same access to clients and business
networks as their white colleagues, and among partners, they tend to be clustered
at the bottom of a firm’s financial and status pecking order.
- The 10 percent minority representation among lawyers lags well behind that
of most other professions, including physicians (24.6 percent), physical scientists
(30.1 percent), computer scientists (23.1 percent), economists (20.3 percent),
accountants (20.8 percent) and postsecondary teachers (24.6 percent).
“Minority progress in the profession remains frustratingly slow,”
concluded Elizabeth Chambliss, a New York Law School professor who wrote the
report for the ABA Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Legal Profession.
“The legal profession is significantly more racially integrated than it
was 50 years ago, and even 25 years ago. Compared to 10 years ago, however,
there has been very little progress. And unless law faculties, employers, corporate
clients and bar associations renew their commitment to racial integration, there
is little hope that things will improve significantly during the next 10 years.”
The commission was created in 1986 to promote “full and equal participation”
of minorities in the legal profession, and Chambliss has prepared two previous
reports.
The new findings come on the heels of a controversial law review article by
a UCLA professor who suggested that ending racial preferences at law schools
would likely increase the number of African-American lawyers because affirmative
action places black students in law schools where they cannot compete academically.
The report focused on four minority groups: African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans
and Native Americans. Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing minority group
among lawyers — their numbers nearly doubled between 1990 and 2000 —
and comprise nearly half of all minority associates and almost one-third of
all minority partners in the nation’s largest law firms.
Hispanic representation has remained fairly constant in the last decade and
Native American representation is not only miniscule but has declined from .201
percent of all lawyers in 1990 to .199 percent in 2000.
After graduation from law school, Chambliss wrote, minorities are less likely
than whites to win judicial clerkship positions or to go into private practice,
and more likely to begin their careers in government or public interest jobs.
In top level jobs, fewer than 4.4 percent of partners in the nation’s
250 largest firms and only 4.3 percent of corporate counsel are minority.
Chambliss cites an over-reliance by law schools on Law School Admission Test
scores and by legal employers on law school rankings, class rank, law review
membership and clerkships as barriers to minority students and lawyers.
Despite what the commission sees as a lack of progress, it did report what
it calls a “happy list of incremental gains” that includes:
- In the private sector, minorities continue to enter law firms at an increasing
rate: minority associates grew from 12.1 percent in 1999 to 14.6 percent in
2000 and reached 17.2 percent in the nation’s largest law firms.
- Minority representation among corporate counsel also increased, from 9
percent in 1998 to 12.5 percent in 2001.
- Minority representation in the public sector increased incrementally: among
federal government lawyers, from 16.5 percent in 2000 to 16.9 percent in 2002;
among administrative law judges, from 9.4 percent in 2000 to 9.9 percent in
2002; and among federal judges, from 16.8 percent in 1999 to 18.6 percent
in 2004.
The commission also found “some light on the horizon” in two developments.
The “business justification” for diversity has begun to catch on
in corporate circles, where a recognition that the U.S. population will soon
become a “majority minority” has prompted efforts to diversify.
Second, the Supreme Court’s decision in Grutter v. Bollinger upholding
race-based affirmative action in the University of Michigan Law School admissions
“promises renewed support for efforts to increase minority access to legal
education, including admission to elite law schools.” The commission called
the ruling “arguably the most important development” in the last
four years.
“These twin developments suggest the dawn of a new era of attention and
commitment to diversity at all stages of lawyers’ careers, from admission
to universities and law schools to advancement in law firms and other work settings,”
the report concludes.
Despite those developments, the commission noted the persistence of traditional
obstacles, including both discrimination or outright racism and ongoing exclusion
from the economic and educational opportunities that are central to professional
success.
Not surprisingly, five California cities and one county provide the highest
statistics when it comes to law firm diversity. Although Miami has the highest
percentage of both minority partners and associates at law firms, it is followed
by San Jose, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Orange County and San Diego. New York
City falls in the middle.
Christopher Prince, past president of the John M. Langston Bar Association
of Los Angeles and an associate at Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, suggested
one reason the legal profession lags behind others is its conservatism. “They
have ways of doing things and just in general, processes in the profession change
extremely slowly. You’re going to have law firms hiring and promoting
the same way they hired and promoted years ago. In contrast, corporations and
their law departments tend to be a little better. They’re not quite as
stuck in the 19th century.”
Prince said law firms also have difficulty recruiting minority lawyers because
they are not diverse and are therefore not inviting to recruits.
Nonetheless, he said he thinks law firms are trying hard to attract minority
lawyers. “I think the thing that would be depressing, and the jury’s
still out on this, is did we peak? Did we sort of make this push over the last
30 years and then we’re done? The fact is, we have an entirely new set
of challenges. The reality is that to take the next step will take a similar
amount of effort.”
Chambliss added a couple of additional explanations for the lack of diversity.
One is the dominance of private business clients in the legal profession, where
“one’s professional status depends significantly on the status of
one’s clients.” Another possibility is that the legal profession
is “more rankings conscious than other professions, such that class rank,
school rank, firm rank, etc., become the sole criterion for judging professional
potential and success. Such a system tends to promote inbreeding.”
The commission offers a series of recommendations to improve the progress of
minorities in the profession, including better research on the distribution
of lawyers by gender and race and on demographics of lawyers in different practice
settings, and heightened fundraising for research and program development to
promote full and equal participation of minorities in the profession. It also
urges law schools to pursue racial diversity among students and faculty, investing
in admissions procedures that Chambliss says will increase costs to comply with
Supreme Court rulings in the University of Michigan case, and to compile data
on the careers of their own graduates, linking postgraduate placement information
to admissions credentials.
“If the legal profession is to successfully confront the obstacles to
minority participation and remain economically competitive in an increasingly
diverse society,” the report concludes, “the profession must commit
itself to systematic and critical self-study.”
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