The national conversation on diversity and equity in the job market grew some major legs in 2017. Between increasing pressure to ensure equal job pay for women and people of color and the growing “Me Too” movement drawn from high-profile allegations of sexual harassment in the technology and media industries, the United States is seeing a particular renaissance around its diversity efforts.

While the cultural moment is generating a lot of momentum and discussion in many industries, the push for equity in the legal industry may take a little extra work. While law firms and corporate legal departments have made some strides in developing and retaining talented women and people of color as associates and leaders, that progress seems to have stagnated somewhat in the last few years. The number of minority lawyers at Am Law 200 firms and NLJ 250 firms grew only 0.6 percent between 2015 and 2016, and minority partnership grew only 0.4 percentage points to reach 8.6 percent in 2016.

Linda Bray Chanow, executive director of the Center for Women in Law (CWIL) at The University of Texas School of Law, has been working on trying to improve the prospects for women in Big Law for nearly 20 years. She sees a new opportunity in this cultural moment to ramp up the energy behind efforts to ensure that women and people of color have a larger place within legal industry leadership.

“This is certainly a time where the momentum is behind women. The firms that really care about this stuff have been moving the ball forward slowly, but with the momentum we have an opportunity to make great strides,” she said.

At Legalweek New York this month, Chanow, along with John Iino, partner and chief diversity officer at Reed Smith, Winston Kirton, assistant general counsel at Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., Michelle Wimes, chief diversity and professional development officer at Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart and Rachel Simmonds-Watson, diversity manager at Debevoise & Plimpton, will discuss the ways forward they see for law firms and corporate legal departments in developing and retaining diverse legal talent.

Chanow noted that CWIL research over the last couple of years has shown a notable drop in women and lawyers of color after the first year at a Big Law firm, making that first year a really important time to support retention.

“For women and lawyers of color, if they're not integrated into the firm in that first year, they're just always playing catch up. You don't feel like you belong in the firm, you don't think you're part of the environment, you don't feel like you have a chance of succeeding,” Chanow said,

Adding to first-year attorneys concerns, the partner track, which often makes Big Law an attractive option for young lawyers, remains homogeneous, both in race and gender. ”Only 20 percent of partners are women, and 50 percent of law firm offices have no women of color partners. If you're a woman of color and you look up and you don't see a single woman who looks like you, how do you approach that first year?” Chanow pointed out.

Panelists plan to share some of the ways they've tried to support young female attorneys and lawyers of color through their first years in Big Law. Wimes deals with many of these issues at Ogletree Deakins, were among the firm's international offices, the number of women and minority leaders is spread thin.

Wimes attributes some of the stagnation in legal's diversity retention to a failure to diversify the kinds of strategies firms use to support women and people of color within their organizations. Notably, she said, they often keep these efforts separate from the business side of firms.

“I think it's because we've done [the] same things over and over again and expected a different result. In many law firms, they silo diversity from all the other strategic imperatives in the firm,” Wimes said, pointing to a disconnect between firms' business development work and their conversations around internal racial and gender equity. “If you have diversity programs that really aren't tied to the economic factors within the firm, they're not going to be successful.”

The strategic imperative to use technology to modernize legal work, for example, can become a hindrance rather than a boon to legal organizations' diversity initiatives. Women and people of color often face many of the same issues with underrepresentation in firm technology leadership roles as they do in other areas of firm leadership, making them subject to, rather than formative of, organizational decisions about technology innovation.

“I want women at the table so that women's voices are part of the solution and part of the changes that occur, so that women coming up will be a part of the thought process in deciding how to handle these changes,” Chanow said.

Many minority staff are taking matters into their own hands to support one another in finding ways into these conversations. Affinity groups and legal networking groups formed by women, people of color, LGBT and other minority groups within the legal industry are finding ways to support one another, even without broader organizational buy-in.

“I see women creating their own networks that will at some point rival the men's. It's slow, we don't have as many people in those [leadership] positions, but we're increasing every day. Not to use an overused word, but if we lean in and push, I think we're reaching a critical point,” Chanow said.