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Leading US law firms hired hundreds fewer ethnic minority candidates last year, as the sector faced a series of legal challenges over its diversity schemes.
An analysis of successful candidates’ biographies, carried out by research group Leopard Solutions, found the number of diverse entry-level hires in the top 200 American firms dropped from 2,371 in 2022 to 2,049 last year. The number of experienced lawyers from ethnic minority backgrounds brought in by the firms fell even more precipitously, from 2,790 to 1,879.
“Ethnic diversity hiring took a hit in 2023 as the overall atmosphere surrounding DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives became fraught in legal and political contexts,” the authors of the Leopard report said. The firms in question “saw an overall 23 per cent decline in lateral hiring, but the decline in ethnically diverse lateral hiring was 31 per cent”, they added.
The findings come after a number of large firms were forced to scrap or widen their diversity fellowships after being threatened with legal action by a group led by conservative campaigner Edward Blum, who had previously won a Supreme Court victory against affirmative action at US universities.
Perkins Coie, Morrison Foerster, Winston & Strawn and Susman Godfrey all edited or clarified their programmes to remove racial considerations from recruitment criteria after coming under attack by Blum. Adams and Reese closed its “minority fellowship” altogether.
While those changes did not effect Leopard’s analysis, the figures show the gap between diverse and non-diverse hires in top US law firms widening, after remaining largely steady between 2019 and 2021, and falling in 2022.
A report on diversity within law firms published in January by the National Association for Law Placement also found that the percentage of people of colour represented among summer associates decreased for the first time since 2017.
Nikia Gray, the NALP’s executive director, wrote that the decrease was “concerning in the wider context of the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action decision and the torrent of litigation against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that has followed”.
She added that the numbers were also troubling because “the diversity of each year’s summer associate cohort is highly correlated to the diversity of graduates entering private practice the following year and the growing diversity of associates overall, which is of course the pipeline for increasing diversity among law firm partners”.
The fightback over diversity criteria has also reached the federal judiciary, with Republican senators writing to the chief judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit to challenge efforts by some judges to provide more opportunities for women and minority lawyers to present oral arguments.
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