Legal scholars struggle to understand the impediments to minority success in large law firms.

By Ronald Roach

In recent years, corporate executives and local bar association officials have increasingly questioned why so few of the nation’s elite corporate law firms can claim significant racial and ethnic diversity among their partner or upper management ranks. Some organizations have even pledged to reward law firms that ensure high-level assignments for their minority attorneys and to penalize those firms that don’t.

In 2004, Roderick A. Palmore, the general counsel for Sara Lee Corp., and top officials at 100 major U.S. companies pledged to curtail or end arrangements with law firms “whose performance consistently evidences a lack of meaningful interest in being diverse.” Earlier this year, Wal-Mart Stores cut back its interactions with two law firms because of their lack of diversity. Sara Lee and Wal-Mart, as well as DuPont, General Motors and Shell Oil, have announced an initiative to boost the number of minority-owned law firms providing legal services for major corporations.

Not surprisingly, a number of law professors from some of the nation’s leading law schools have taken it upon themselves to examine why the leadership ranks of large corporate law firms remain essentially a White men’s club.

In 2005, non-White attorneys made up only 4.6 percent of partners at the nation’s largest law firms, according to the National Association for Law Placement. Black and Hispanic attorneys each accounted for less than 1 percent of partners in these firms,
experts say.

“Small firms are still quite segregated, but most people don’t see this as a problem,” says Dr. John M. Conley, a law professor at the University of North Carolina. “The controversy comes with the larger firms, especially the large elite ones that pay the highest salaries. They’ve done better at the entry level, but at the partnership level minority representation continues to be abysmal.