b u i l di n g a better legal profession a n a t i o n a l g r a s s r o o t s o r g a n i z a t i o n - - -

Transcription

1 b u i l di n g a better legal profession a n a t i o n a l g r a s s r o o t s o r g a n i z a t i o n h t t p : / / r e f i r m a t i o n. w o r d p r e s s. c o m EMBARGOED UNTIL OCTOBER 12:30 PM EST Law Students Building a Better Legal Profession Releases New NYC Rankings Washington, D.C., October 10, 2007 Law Students Building a Better Legal Profession today will release a series of reports ranking large law firms in New York City and other major legal markets on gender composition, diversity, billable hours, and pro bono participation. The new documents highlight major differences in large law firms and will enable law students to make more informed choices about their entry into the profession. The rankings are available online at The national grassroots organization of law students will release its report at a press conference on Wednesday, October 10 at 12:30 pm. The event will occur in the Zenger Room (13th Floor) of the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Representatives from several law schools, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, will be in attendance. Most students think big firms are indistinguishable. But they're not," said co-president Andrew Bruck, a 3L at Stanford Law School. "Our report helps students see the differences between their potential employers. There s a tremendous market for law students, and markets rely on information. By providing this information to students, we re helping students make better informed choices about where they want to work after graduation. Rankings are available for six of the nation s largest legal markets: New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Here are brief findings from the New York City rankings: Gender Composition: At all large firms surveyed in New York City, 1 women are significantly less represented as partners than as associates. At Morrison & Foerster, which has the highest percentage of female partners in New York, women make up 23.3% of all partners. At Fulbright & Jaworski, which has the lowest percentage of female partners in New York, women are only 7.1% of all partners. Low Diversity Partnership Rates: Of the 74 New York firms included in the report, 27 (over one-third) do not have a single Hispanic partner, 25 do not have a single African-American partner, and 21 do not have a single Asian- American partner. 1 The report includes all New York offices that employ more than 100 attorneys and which completed a single-office questionnaire in the February 1, 2007 NALP survey. See our document How We Did This for more information.

2 b u i l di n g a better legal profession a n a t i o n a l g r a s s r o o t s o r g a n i z a t i o n h t t p : / / r e f i r m a t i o n. w o r d p r e s s. c o m Diversity Report Card: Looking at all forms of diversity (gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation), several firms are significantly more diverse than their peers: Cleary Gottlieb is the only firm to score in the A range, with Paul, Weiss and Debevoise, and Orrick close behind. At the bottom of the list are four law firms Herrick Feinstein, Blank Rome, Pryor Cashman, and Paul Hastings that score well below their peers for attracting a diverse workforce. LGBT Representation: Although Sullivan & Cromwell currently faces a lawsuit alleging sexual orientation discrimination, it ranks first in New York for its percentage of partners that are openly LGBT. Sidley Austin, however, has 449 attorneys working in its New York office and yet not a single out LGBT partner. Pro Bono Participation: Firms vary in their commitment to pro bono work. At Patterson Belknap, 100% of all partners and associates contribute to pro bono, while at Cahill Gordon, only 16% of partners and 20% of associates volunteer their legal skills in some way. Twenty-two firms did not respond to this question, which suggests that some may exhibit lower participation rates. Transparency: All of the information in this report comes from data collected by NALP. Some firms are better than others, however, at reporting data on billable hours and pro bono work two areas of high student concern. Ten firms, including DLA Piper, WilmerHale, and Goodwin Procter, were the most responsive when it came to answering these questions. Five firms, including Wachtell, Greenberg Traurig, and Shearman & Sterling, did not fill out these portions of the survey. Full results and a longer explanation of how the rankings were compiled are available online at This is a extraordinarily impressive effort to shine much needed light on law firms commitment to diversity, not just in principle but in practice, said Deborah L. Rhode, McFarland Professor of Law and Director of the Center on Ethics, Stanford University and Former Chair, ABA Commission on Women in the Profession. This should be the starting point of a constructive conversation between firms, law schools, law students, and bar organizations about how to create a just and equitable professional culture. We are proud to earn this recognition from Law Students Building a Better Legal Profession, said Ralph Baxter, chairman and CEO of Orrick, which ranked highly in overall diversity in New York. A commitment to workplace diversity is essential in attracting and retaining exceptional attorneys out of law school and to ensuring the success of law firms. It will continue to be a top priority at Orrick.

3 b u i l di n g a better legal profession a n a t i o n a l g r a s s r o o t s o r g a n i z a t i o n h t t p : / / r e f i r m a t i o n. w o r d p r e s s. c o m Firms have to do more than compete on salary alone. Whether the metric is gender equity, billable hour expectations, or attrition rates, lawyers will be attracted to highperforming firms, and avoid firms unresponsive to their priorities, said Law Students Building a Better Legal Profession co-founder Andrew Canter. We look forward to distributing these rankings to our members and law students across the country. Additional praise for the report can be found on Page 4 of this press release. About Law Students Building a Better Legal Profession Law Students Building a Better Legal Profession is a national grassroots organization made up of law students from across the country. Its 150+ members are committed to a legal profession devoted to effective and efficient client service, to lawyers as people, and to the roots of our profession in service. The organization encourages law students to use their market power to support law firms taking concrete steps toward a more sustainable legal profession. It has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, National Law Journal, Legal Times, and the San Francisco Daily Journal, among other publications. Media Contacts: Andrew Bruck Co-President bruck@stanford.edu Andrew Canter Co-Founder canter@stanford.edu

4 b u i l di n g a better legal profession a n a t i o n a l g r a s s r o o t s o r g a n i z a t i o n h t t p : / / r e f i r m a t i o n. w o r d p r e s s. c o m Praise for Building a Better Legal Profession Building a Better Legal Profession has provided us with a resource that has great promise. By comparing the largest law firms in the top legal markets, the students have put a spotlight on the key issues of demographic diversity, pro bono participation and hours billed, which are such important indicators of the heart and soul of a firm. It is particularly noteworthy that these law students are showing initiative and demonstrating a commitment to improving the profession and career options for themselves and for all those who will come after them. These enterprising law students have an enormous potential to be a force for good and for positive change now and throughout their careers. I commend them for their dedication and hard work. -- Marcia D. Greenberger, Co-President, National Women s Law Center This report confirms that the legal profession has a long way to go in terms of becoming more diverse and fully reflective of our society. We hope that this report can also serve as a springboard for devising strategies that increase minority representation in law firms." -- L. Jared Boyd, National Attorney General, National Black Law Students Association This pathbreaking research sends a message to America's law firms that is loud and clear: the best law students want to work at the firms where they have a fair chance at promotion, and where it is possible to work hard and enjoy a family life. It's about time students collected this kind of basic information about law firms and began to vote with their feet. -- Michele Landis Dauber, Professor of Law, Stanford Law School. Professor Dauber can be reached at mldauber (at) law.stanford.edu or These reports are extremely important. Even the best intentioned law firms can have gaps between policy and actual practice and objective numbers can help point out those gaps. Law firms as well as law students will benefit from better information that is widely available." -- Cynthia Thomas Calvert, Co-Director, Project for Attorney Retention Law students are in a powerful position to positively influence the legal profession by making educated choices early in their careers about the kinds of law firms for which they want to work. Too often, students don't have the information to really evaluate what a firm prioritizes in hiring and retaining lawyers. This program has the potential to remedy that problem and to give law students the tools to begin their careers in environments where they will be welcome and encouraged while getting to do important, challenging work. -- Kate Reilly, Vice President, Harvard Women's Law Association. Ms. Reilly can be reached at kreilly (at) law.harvard.edu or

5 How We Did This Our process is simple: cut, paste, and rank. The National Association for Legal Career Professionals (NALP) maintains a public, online directory of law firm employment statistics including demographic information, attorney hours, and pro bono participation to facilitate legal career counseling and planning. 1 For every law firm employing more than 100 attorneys in Manhattan, we collected particular points from the NALP directory and then sorted the firms from highest to lowest. Our original plan was to generate rankings on a variety of metrics, including firms minimum billable hour requirements, average associate hours worked, demographic diversity, average pro bono hours, and the number of part-time attorneys. Although NALP asks firms to include all of this information in their annual questionnaire, many firms leave one or more sections blank. In addition, for some statistics, firms will use competing criteria when determining their numbers (i.e., different definitions of part-time work), and thus this data is less reliable for sorting purposes. Given these limitations, we decided to prioritize rankings with only on the most cut-and-dry information: diversity and pro bono participation. Billable hours are also ranked, but include a disclaimer about reporting methods. Should firms provide more information to NALP in future questionnaires, we will prepare similar reports based on the new data. OUR RANKINGS We present demographic statistics in three ways. First, our Diversity Rankings cover five groups underrepresented in the legal profession: women, African- Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and openly lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered individuals (LGBT). We rank the firms by the percentage of attorneys they employ from that group, with separate lists for partners and associates. We also include the actual number of attorneys from that minority group immediately to the right of each firm s percentage. When two or more firms have the same percentage, we rank higher the firm that has a larger raw number of attorneys from that group. 2 When two or more firms have zero attorneys from the underrepresented group, we rank higher the firm that has fewer total associates. 3 On the far right side of the page, we divide the firms into quintiles, 1 About Us, NALP Directory of Legal Employers, available at (last visited September 8, 2007). The data included in this report is based on the most recent firm-reported information, which was current as of February 1, We think the firm that has 14 black associates out of 200 total associates ought to be ranked higher than one that has 7 out of 100 total. 3 We think that a firm with 75 partners but no Hispanics ones ought to be ranked higher than a firm with 150 partners and not a single Hispanic one.

6 allowing readers to see if a particular firm falls into, say, the top fifth or the second fifth of the rankings. The second way we present our demographic data is with a Diversity Report Card. This document aggregates the information from our five Diversity Rankings pages and presents them in a simple chart. Our process is similar to a professor s grading system: the firm s ranking in each diversity chart is assigned a letter grade (A, B, C, D, or F), and then averaged to suggest the firm s overall diversity. We assign grades based on the quintile in which a firm appears: if a firm is in the top fifth in percentage of female associates, then it receives an A for that category; if another firm is in the second fifth, it receives a B, and so on. We created one exception to this grading process. If a firm does not have any attorneys in a certain category (i.e., if they have zero Hispanic partners or zero LGBT associates), then we automatically gave them an F, regardless of quintile. 4 To illustrate, if Firm ZYX is in the top quintile for female associates, the secondfrom-bottom quintile for female partners, and the middle quintile for all other rankings, then its scorecard would have one A, one D, and eight C s. 5 We then calculate the grades as if it were someone s GPA: the A is worth 4.0, the D is worth 1.0, the C s are 3.0 each. This averages to a 2.9 overall or, using the traditional grading scale, a C+. We then rank firms by their overage average. We do this not to suggest that one firm is more diverse than the other simply because it has a higher overall grade, but to provide students with a quick reference guide when trying to figure out how well represented certain minority groups are at a particular firm. DATA ON THE NEW YORK MARKET Using the NALP Directory, we collected data on every firm that has at least 100 attorneys in its Manhattan office. We did not, however, include in our rankings every firm that met this criteria. Although most large firms complete separate NALP questionnaires for each of their regional offices allowing us to view statistics for just their Manhattan employees nine provide NALP only with firmwide data. In each of those cases, the Manhattan office made up for only a fraction of the total attorneys covered in the statistics. Accordingly, we excluded the following nine companies: 4 In New York, this exception only affects the grades of a few firms in the black partner and the Hispanic partner rankings. In both categories, there are so many firms with zero minority representation that they fill the entire bottom quintile and spill over into the second-to-bottom quintile. Under the normal grading pattern, firms in the penultimate quintile would receive a D; under our exception, firms with no black or Hispanic partners in this quintile receive a F instead. We did not think it fair to reward a firm with anything more than a failing grade when it failed to retain a single minority partner. 5 The other eight would be: black partners, black associates, Hispanic partners, Hispanic associates, Asian partners, Asian associates, LGBT partners, and LGBT associates.

7 Allen & Overy Brown Rudnick Kasowitz, Benson Kenyon & Kenyon Linklaters Quinn, Emanuel Milbank, Tweed Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett Thacher Proffitt & Wood When compiling our data, we also found that five firms included information from two or three of their offices in one NALP questionnaire, but that their New York office will employ the overwhelming majority of the lawyers included. For example, Schulte Roth fills out a single questionnaire for offices in New York and London. However, of the 457 attorneys at the firm, 447 are in New York and 10 are in London. We decided to include those firms in our rankings. Although we acknowledge that demography and diversity-based hiring practices may vary from city to city, and thus that including information from multiple locations can skew rankings, we decided that the number of attorneys at these few firms were so small as to be negligible. We concluded that the benefit of providing a greater number of New York firms in our rankings overweighed the possible harm of a data point skewed slightly by including information from lawyers in a different legal market. To make clear that these firms contain some non-ny data, we marked them with an asterisk (*) in the rankings: Cahill Gordon 283 total; 4 in London, UK; 3 in Washington, DC Carter Ledyard 114 total; 4 in Washington, DC Cravath, Swaine & Moore 484 total; 18 in London, UK Pryor Cashman 114 total; 2 in Los Angeles, CA Schulte Roth 447 total; 10 in London, UK Similarly, we found that two firms completed a single questionnaire for two or more offices when they have a large office in Manhattan and several smaller branch offices in suburban New Jersey. We decided to include these firms in our rankings, as we concluded that the suburban New Jersey legal market was sufficiently comparable to the Manhattan market so as to have virtually no effect on the rankings. These firms are also marked with an asterisk (*) in the rankings: Herrick Feinstein 174 total; 23 in Newark, NJ; 10 in Princeton, NJ Thelen Reid 253 total; approximately 9 in northern New Jersey 6 6 In their NALP questionnaire, Thelen Reid does not break down the number of attorneys working in their Manhattan office and their offices in Florham Park and Morristown, New Jersey. A search of Thelen Reid s website suggests that nine of their attorneys are based in New Jersey. See Attorney Search, available at (last visited September 8, 2007) (At Office pull-down menu, select Northern New Jersey and click Search.)

8 Finally, although all of the firms we included in our rankings provided most of their demographic diversity information, we discovered that five firms did not include statistics on the number of openly gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered attorneys in their New York office. These firms were thus left out of the Diversity Ranking for LGBT lawyers: Cooley Godward Epstein Becker Greenberg Traurig Katten Muchin Winston & Strawn ACCURACY We are strongly committed to providing students with data that is 100% accurate. If you believe that we have miscalculated any data in this report, please contact us at refirmation (at) gmail.com so that we may correct the error.