After Five Years of Columns on Diversity: Do You Care?

Over the past five years, the Philadelphia Diversity Law Group has written this monthly column. I intended for my column to be a retrospective of the many great columns that have been written and hoped to postulate that the columns were having a positive effect on the diversity landscape. However, as I read through five years of columns, it seemed that there was a recurring theme. We write, we poll, we discuss diversity, but there is no movement forward. So I ask the question: Do you care?

Apathy is not a word generally associated with lawyers, but in reading the various columns over the past five years on the now- or then-current state of diversity in the legal profession, I found myself wondering if lawyers and their respective firms have become apathetic toward diversity. These columns do not paint a picture of improvement on the diversity front. In fact, they demonstrate just the opposite — we are losing ground. Indeed, while our nation is becoming more diverse, law firms are being left behind.