Law Firm Diversity Interrupted?

By James Leipold

In January, NALP released its 2024 Report on Diversity in US Law Firms .  The topline takeaway? For the second year in a row the representation of Black or African American summer associates decreased. Similarly, the new law school enrollment data that the ABA released in December show a small decrease in Black and Hispanic enrollment.

None of these decreases is large in size, nor are there enough years of downward trending numbers to call this a trend, but having carefully followed both of these lines of data for many years — in the case of the research from NALP, I’ve followed it for more than 20 years now — I find these developments particularly discouraging. 

I am discouraged, as are many of you, because we are living through a moment of intense anti-DEI energy in our country, a time when fear and confusion and even chaos are enveloping DEI initiatives in both higher education and the corporate world, including law firms. There is real risk in this moment of uncertainty.

The NALP news is not all bad, as many positive diversity milestones are reported, and are consistent with the long history of slow but steady growth in the representation of diverse people in American law firms. But as NALP notes in this year’s report, even that slow and incremental growth could be at risk: “the summer associate data signals this growth could be sluggish in coming years, particularly for Black or African American individuals.” My real fear, of course, is that there exists the possibility that all the forward momentum will be reversed, that when we look back five or ten years from now, we will see that diversity in legal education and in the legal profession peaked in the first quarter of the 21st century and then began a slow but steady decline. It belongs to all of us to work to prevent that.

On the upside, the new NALP report shows record levels of representation for women, people of color, and LGBTQ lawyers in US law firms in 2024. Here are a few highlights from their report:

• The percentage of summer associates of color improved by 0.8 percentage points in 2024, reaching a new high of 43.07%, with much of this growth attributed to an increase in Asian and multiracial summer associates.
• After comprising the majority of associates for the first time in 2023, women continued to make gains, growing to 51.62% of all associates in 2024.
• The percentage of associates of color increased to 31.46%, a new record high.
• Women of color comprised more than 5% of all partners for the first time in 2024.
• The proportion of LGBTQ summer associates continued to grow with nearly 13% of all summer associates identifying as LGBTQ in 2024.

But at the partnership level, the NALP report points out, white men still dominate the ranks, noting that in 2024, just 24.8% of equity partners were women, and only 10.2% were people of color. 

The drop in Black summer associates is particularly concerning because as NALP executive director Nikia Gray points out, “associates of color still convert to partners at much lower rates than White associates, resulting in a nearly 20 percent point disparity between this cohort's representation at the partnership level compared to that at the associate level. If the percentage of Black summer associates were to continue to drop, that dramatic gap in representation at the partnership level might never be closed.

As for the ABA numbers, despite the small drop in Black and Hispanic enrollment in the first year law school class, the conclusion seems to be that “the U.S. Supreme Court's 2023 ruling against race-conscious affirmative action policies did little to impact the makeup of 2024's first year law students."

It is true that small drops in Black and Hispanic law school enrollment and small drops in Black representation among law firm summer associates are not in and of themselves significant, particularly if those numbers quickly reverse themselves in the years immediately ahead. But if they don’t get reversed, if those small incremental drops are steady, then over time the extraordinary gains the profession has made will indeed erode.

It is a very hard moment in American history to be vigilant, and confusion and fear can quickly erode our confidence, but vigilant we must remain. Organizations like NALP and LSAC and the ABA have themselves been vigilant in measuring the changes in representation in law schools, law firms, and the entire legal profession. And because of that robust tradition of gathering and publishing this data and holding a mirror up to the profession, we will know soon enough whether these small drops measured in law schools and law firms in 2024 were indeed the beginning of a downward trend in diversity in the legal profession. Let us all continue to work to make sure they are not.