According to the latest law firm demographic findings from the National Association for Law Placement Inc. (NALP), women and minority partners continued to make small gains in their representation among law firm partners as a whole in 2013. The percentage of minority associates also has rebounded.
However, the percentage of women associates has eroded every year since 2010. The net result is very small net gains in the representation of women and minority lawyers overall.
NALP’s newest findings on law firm demographics reveal that law firms have recouped the ground lost when minority associate figures fell in 2010 following widespread associate layoffs in 2009.
The representation of women among associates, however, declined slightly for the fourth year in a row.
“Since the recession, we have seen the figures for women associates drop in each of four successive years,” said James Leipold, NALP’s executive director. “While minority associate numbers also dipped immediately after the recession, they quickly rebounded, while the numbers for women have not. This is a significant historical shift, and represents a divergence in the previously parallel stories of women and minorities in large law firms.”
“While the percentage of women partners, small as it is, has continued to grow each year, sustained incremental growth in the future is at risk if the percentage of women associates continues to inch downwards,” he said. “This should be a red flag for everyone in legal education and the law firm world,” Leipold concluded.
Among associates, the percentage of women had increased from 38.99 percent in 1993 to 45.66 percent in 2009, before falling back each year since, to 44.79 percent in 2013.
Over the same period, minority associate percentages have increased from 8.36 percent to 20.93 percent, more than recovering from a slight decline from 2009 to 2010.
Representation of minority women among associates in the two most recent years just barely exceeded the 11.02 percent figure for 2009.
In 2013, the percentage of both women and minority partners in law firms across the nation increased a small amount over 2012.
Representation of minority women specifically was up by a small amount, as was representation of minorities as a whole.
During most of the 21 years that NALP has been compiling this information, law firms had made steady, if somewhat slow progress in increasing the presence of women and minorities in both the partner and associate ranks.
In 2013 that slow upward trend continued for partners, with minorities accounting for 7.10 percent of partners in the nation’s major firms, and women accounting for 20.22 percent of the partners in these firms.
In 2012, the figures were 6.71 percent and 19.91 percent, respectively. Nonetheless, the total change since 1993, the first year for which NALP has comparable aggregate information, has been only marginal. At that time minorities accounted for 2.55 percent of partners and women accounted for 12.27 percent of partners. At just 2.26 percent of partners in 2013, minority women continue to be the most dramatically underrepresented group at the partnership level, a pattern that holds across all firm sizes and most jurisdictions. This is despite small but consistent year-over-year increases. The representation of minority women partners is somewhat higher, 2.74 percent, at the largest firms of more than 700 lawyers. Minority men, meanwhile, account for just 4.84 percent of partners this year, compared with 4.55 percent in 2012.
The net effect of these changes was that, for lawyers as a whole, representation of women (both minority and non-minority) was up by only about one-tenth of a percentage point and remains lower than in 2009.
The representation of minorities among lawyers as a whole inched up in 2013; the representation of women among all lawyers increased by a smaller amount, and all of this gain can be attributed to increases in women among the partnership ranks.
Since this overall figure for women fell in both 2010 and 2011, the small increases in the past two years mean that the overall percentage for women remains only slightly higher than in 2010.
Minorities now make up 13.36 percent of lawyers at these law firms, compared with 12.91 percent in 2012.
Just under one-third of lawyers at these same firms are women — 32.78 percent in 2013 compared with 32.67 percent in 2012, 32.61 percent in 2011, and 32.69 percent in 2010 — all lower than the 32.97 percent mark reached in 2009.
Minority women now account for 6.49 percent of lawyers at these firms, up slightly from 6.32 percent in 2012, and finally exceeding the 6.33 percent figure for 2009.
The representation of women and minorities in the summer associate ranks compares much more favorably to the population of recent law school graduates.
According to the American Bar Association, since 2000, the percentage of minority law school graduates has ranged from 20 percent to 24 percent, while women have accounted for 46 percent to 49 percent of graduates, with the high point coming in the mid-2000s.
In 2013, women comprise 45.32 percent of summer associates, minorities account for 29.51 percent, and 15.78 percent of summer associates were minority women. However, all of these measures are lower than in 2012.
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