The percentage of minority attorneys at the nation’s largest law firms held relatively steady last yearand considering how fragile diversity numbers can be, we’ll consider that good news. According to the latest Diversity Scorecard by our sibling publication The American Lawyer, 13.6 percent of lawyers at the nation’s largest firms in 2011 were minority lawyers, compared to 13.9 percent in 2010.
But we’re not too worried about the slight dip, for two reasons. First, we’ve tweaked the methodology. In past Scorecards, we’ve based our results on lawyer head counts. In collecting data for 2011, we asked firms to calculate full-time equivalent (FTE) numbers for the entire calendar year. This means that part-time attorneys are prorated in our statistics. This also means that the number of minority associates may have dropped at firms where the new class of associates starts in September, because those incoming associates now count for a quarter of what they once did. And this in turn may have caused some firms to perform less well under our new methodology because an incoming class of associates is often the most diverse group of attorneys in a firm.
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