Law Firms Still Lag in Minority Hiring

By: David Rubenstein and Jennifer Juarez RoblesThe top echelon of Chicago's largest law firms are as white today as they were three years ago, according to a survey by The Chicago Reporter. Since 1987, the biggest, most influential firms have brought on 250 new partners, only five of them black, two Hispanic and two Asian. In other words, the firms have filled partner slots with 27 times more whites than minorities.

A more encouraging trend was found among the legal rank and file, the entry-level associates. While the total number of associates has increased by 16 percent, the number of minority associates has grown more than twice as fast, by 35 percent.

Other highlights of the survey, which was developed in part by journalism students at Roosevelt University, include:

• There were 27 minority partners in early 1990, compared to 25 minorities at the same firms in 1988 and 24 in 1987. Blacks, Asians and Hispanics were stuck at 1.2 percent of all partners in each of the three years examined in the survey.

• Sidley & Austin, the largest law office in Chicago, had one black partner. The number two and three largest firms, Mayer, Brown & Platt and Katten, Muchin & Zavis had none.

• In 1989, there were only eight Hispanics among the roughly 2,000 partners in 21 of Chicago's largest firms. Among the top five firms in Chicago, there was only one Hispanic partner, at Mayer, Brown.

• The number of minority associates climbed to 130 in 1990 from 96 in 1987.

• Three firms - Katten, Muchin; Altheimer & Gray; and Seyfarth, Shaw, Fairweather & Geraldson - did not employ any Hispanic attorneys in the past three years. And two firms - Schiff, Hardin & Waite and Altheimer & Gray - did not hire any Asians.

• While the total number of summer associates - minority and white - increased by 24 percent at 20 firms, the number of minorities in this category has nearly doubled since 1987. Summer associates are law school students who work as apprentices for the firm and may be offered jobs after graduation. Last summer, 73 minorities, including 47 blacks, worked for 20 of the large firms compared to 37 minorities, 24 blacks, at these firms in 1987.

• Not one of Chicago's 25 biggest firms has an American Indian partner. There is one entry level Native American attorney, an associate at Sidley & Austin, the law firm with the most minority associates.

These statistics are based on surveys asking about minority representation from 1987 to 1989 that the Reporter sent to Chicago's 25 largest law firms, as ranked by Crain's Chicago Business Several of the firms did not respond or provided incomplete data, so the survey was augmented with minority hiring data from the Directory of Legal Employers, published by the National Association of Law Placement, a 19-year-old educational agency for those involved in legal recruiting.

Few Minority Graduates
Many of the firms surveyed said that the reason they do not hire more minorities is that there are too few highly qualified blacks and Hispanics.

"The law firms only want the cream of the crop, but there are fewer minority attorneys available at that level," said Steven H. Pugh, one of two black partners among 700 partners in 21 firms analyzed.

"If your experience as a law firm is to hire from the top 15 law schools in the nation and then only the top 25 percent of the class, you have just about taken minorities out of the picture," said Pugh of Chapman & Cutler. "I think you are only talking about a pool of 100 [minorities]. And all the law firms are going after that same number."

Indeed, American Bar Association (ABA) data show that for every minority who graduated from the nation's top 25 law schools in 1989, as ranked in US. News and World Report, there were six whites.

Closer to home, minorities were even less well-represented. There were 14 whites for every minority who graduated in 1989 from the three top-25 schools in Illinois: University of Chicago, Northwestern University and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Not only do few blacks and Hispanics attend big-name schools, they tend to have lower grades than their white counterparts, law firms complain.

While no data is available on students' grades by race, minorities' scores on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), considered a reliable predictor of future law school performance, are 10 points lower than whites', according to the Law School Admission Council in Newton, Penn., which is affiliated with the group that oversees the LSAT. The mean for all test-takers is 32; the mean for minorities is 22 on a scale of 10 to 48.

Associate Dean Robert Clayton of Tulane University Law School explained the implications of LSAT data, using an example from the University of Chicago. In 1989 the average LSAT score for an entering freshman there was 44, and only 48 blacks out of 5,000-plus law school applicants score that high, said Clayton, a member of the council committee that compiled the figures.

"What that means is that you are introducing, based on your admission criteria, black and Hispanic students who are predicted to finish in the bottom 50 percent of the class," he said. And the higher the standards of the school, the further down in class rank minorities are likely to be.

Double-Standard Exists
It seems clear that significantly fewer minorities than whites attend the most prestigious law schools and get the highest grades. But critics say that big law firms are stretching the truth when they claim to hire only the smartest students from the best schools.

Michigan Supreme Court Judge Dennis W. Archer is one such critic, and a forceful one. Active in ABA efforts to improve minority status in the legal profession for almost 20 years, he was on a key ABA Task Force on Opportunities for Minorities In the Profession in 1984 and the driving force behind its prototype Minority Counsel Demonstration Project. He also served six years on the ABA Law School Accreditation Committee.

For years, Archer told the Reporter, law firms have responded to criticism of their hiring practices by saying they were taking only the top students in the nationally ranked schools.

"Basically, it was a big lie. These law firms that say they are only hiring the top 10,15 or 20 percent in fact were hiring from the top 20, 30, 40 - and in some instances - 50 percent," Archer said. "What they were saying is, 'We only hire the top 10 or 15 percent if they are minority.'"

Legal placement veteran David J. White, of David J. White & Associates, which publishes a digest of legal job opportunities, agreed there is a different standard for white and black attorneys.

"Law firms might hire someone blond and blue-eyed, who just has this winning and confident personality," White said. "Anyone who meets this guy would feel he is going to make it - even though he didn't go to the University of Chicago or Northwestern.

"He went to Loyola, graduated in the upper third. This guy could end up in a major firm. It might not be the corporate securities department [considered the most prestigious] but he could wind up in a major firm. I am not going to tell you that a black guy who went to the same school could wind up there; I don't think he could."

The placement director of a Chicago-area law school summed up the double-standard this way: "If it's a minority student with a 'C' average, it's easy for law firms to point to that and say, 'No go.' If it's a white student with a 'C' average, they can say there are all these other good things to make up for the grades. They feel there is more of a fit: They are already one of us; they went to the same preppy schools."

Archer says he finds outstanding minority law students outside of the big name schools. "Some of these students would run rings around the so called top-10 law school graduates," Archer said.

Mentoring and Retention
Another reason for the paucity of minorities in major law firms is that blacks and Hispanics increasingly may be staying away from predominately white firms. Martha Fay Africa, a principal in the legal recruiting firm Mapr, Wilson & Africa, said that students as well as practicing lawyers are telling her they do not want to work in firms without minorities in senior as well as entry-level positions.

"It's common knowledge that a lot of lawyers are unhappy with their profession," said Barack Obama, a summer associate at Hopkins & Sutter and the first black to head the Harvard Law Review. "The difficulties end up, inevitably, being magnified for young minorities, either because they don't have support networks or because their abilities may be questioned due to racism. They feel under the gun."

Anecdotal as well as objective evidence shows that these same problems may be causing blacks and Hispanics to leave big law firms more quickly than their white counterparts. According to the survey, retention rates were lower for minorities, although not by much. The firms responding reported that the average tenure for minority attorneys who left in the past five years was 2.6 years. For non-minority attorneys, the average was three years.

Interviews by the Reporter suggest that among black attorneys who left firms, women were more likely than men to have been turned off by race and gender related problems. Several lawyers said it is more difficult for women to connect with mentors-older, usually male lawyers who show associates the ropes by introducing them to clients and helping them negotiate the internal politics of the firm. Finding mentors is particularly difficult for minority women, survey respondents said.

Muzette ("Wally") Hill, a black graduate of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, clerked for a federal appeals judge after graduating law school in 1984. Then she went to work at Lord, Bissell & Brook in Chicago. Six years later, she is still there. Hill said she found mentors at her firm, but she seems to be an exception. Of the roughly two dozen minority attorneys whom she met when she took the Illinois bar exam in 1984, she is the only one still working at the firm where she started.

The problem, she said, is that older lawyers bring along those they see as having "some promise or spark." All too often, Hill said, that something is, "They remind me of me when I was a young lawyer."

"The obvious problem with that is that if most of the partners and most of the people making the decisions are white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant males, how is a Chicano female going to remind them of themselves as a young lawyer?" Hill asked. "It's not like anyone burns a cross in your front yard; it's more like benign neglect."

To counter the hiring problems identified most frequently by law firm committees, the Chicago Committee for Minorities in large law firms advocates a more aggressive strategy to recruit minorities.