It’s not much, but it’s enough to make diversity advocates in the legal profession let out a collective “phew!” According to our latest Diversity Scorecard, big law firms increased their percentage of minority attorneys in 2010 by 0.2 percent, to 13.9 percent. This small jump is noteworthy because it halts the dip seen last year, when law firm diversity dropped for the first time in the decade that we’ve collected these numbers.
“My first thought is relief,” says Fred Alvarez, an employment law partner at the top-ranked firm in the Scorecard, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. He also chairs the American Bar Association’s commission on racial and ethnic diversity. “It was significant to me that what had been a long, steady progress was reversing in 2009. I was hoping that [decrease] would just be a blip,” he says.
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