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Minority lawyers at America’s largest law firms are being used as “fronts” in initial meetings with clients, only to be excluded from further work, according to a survey of hundreds of attorneys.
Almost a third of respondents Survey conducted by Leopard Solutions —mostly from minority ethnic backgrounds—said they had been included in the proposals but were ultimately kept out of the team working on subsequent contracts.
In 85 percent of cases, the work in question was within the attorney’s area of practice. Black attorneys encountered this phenomenon most frequently: nearly 40 percent said they had been overlooked.
Several lawyers They also claimed that their images were used in presentations for clients without their knowledge.
“It happens all the time,” wrote one respondent. “The customer has diversity “Candidates don’t have any qualifications or they can be black, so they want a black person in the meeting to get the job. The job comes in, I don’t know anything about it, and it goes somewhere else, usually to a non-diverse person.”
Laura Leopard, founder of the firm that carried out the research, said the findings raised “an interesting question” about why there is not more “resistance” from corporate clients of major law firms.
“If they don’t get the team they expected, they should turn around and say, ‘Wait, where’s the rest of the team? ’” he said.
The findings of the Leopard Solution survey come after several large law firms were forced to eliminate diversity recruiting initiatives in the wake of a Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action.
Perkins Coie, Morrison Foerster, Winston & Strawn and Susman Godfrey all edited or clarified their programs to remove racial considerations from recruiting criteria after coming under attack from conservative activist Edward Blum. Adams and Reese closed their “minority fellowship” altogether.
Even before those changes, Leopard figures showed the gap between diverse and non-diverse hires at top US law firms was widening in 2023, after remaining broadly flat between 2019 and 2021, and falling in 2022.
A report released in January by the National Association for Legal Placement also found that the percentage of people of color represented among summer associates declined for the first time since 2017.
“It’s going to be harder to recruit lawyers from underrepresented groups because their numbers will be smaller,” Leopard said. Firms “are going to have to work very hard to retain lawyers, and that means not having bias in the firm, it means a fairer allocation of work.”“
He added: “If you feel like you were there just for the look, just for decoration, are you going to stay at that company??”