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Minority attorneys at the largest US law firms are being used as “window dressing” in initial meetings with clients, only to be excluded from subsequent work, according to a survey of hundreds of lawyers.
Nearly a third of the respondents to a poll carried out by Leopard Solutions — most from minority ethnic backgrounds — said they had been included in pitches but ultimately kept off the team working on subsequent contracts.
In 85 per cent of these cases, the work in question was within the attorney’s practice area. Black lawyers encountered this phenomenon more regularly, with almost 40 per cent claiming they had been passed over.
Several lawyers also reported that their images were used in client pitch decks without their knowledge.
“Happens all the time,” one respondent wrote. “The client has diversity requirements or might be Black, so they want a Black person in the meeting to secure the work. The work comes in, I don’t know about it, and it goes elsewhere, usually to a non-diverse person.”
Laura Leopard, founder of the company that carried out the research, said the findings raised “an interesting question” as to why there is not more “pushback” from the leading law firms’ corporate clients.
“If they don’t get the team that they were expecting, they should turn around and say, . . . Wait, where’s the rest of the team?,” she said.
The conclusions of Leopard Solution’s survey come as several large law firms were forced to kill off diversity recruitment 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 programmes to remove racial considerations from recruitment criteria after coming under attack by conservative activist Edward Blum. Adams and Reese closed its “minority fellowship” altogether.
Even before those changes, figures by Leopard showed the gap between diverse and non-diverse hires in top US law firms widening in 2023, after remaining largely steady between 2019 and 2021, and falling in 2022.
A report 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.
“It’s going to be harder to hire attorneys from under-represented groups because their numbers are going to be smaller,” Leopard said. Firms are “going to have to really work hard for retention, and that means not experiencing bias at the firm, it means more fair work allocation.”
She added: “If you feel that you were there just for face value, just for window dressing, are you going to stay at that firm?”
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