Legal Commentary

The National Law Journal continues to cover the difficult issue of diversity within our legal industry.

Following the recent report about gender pay discrepancies comes the discouraging news that minority women are rarely successful in attempts to climb BigFirm partnership ladders, writes reporter Karen Sloan:

The number of women and minority attorneys at major U.S. law firms is creeping up, but those groups remain significantly underrepresented in the partner ranks.

That finding comes from a new report by the National Association for Law Placement (NALP), which analyzed 2008 demographics from firms in 46 cities.

Minority women remain the most underrepresented group among law firm partners, according to the report. They currently make up 1.88% of partners at law firms. By contrast, the report found that minority men make up 4.21% of partners, and women overall account for 18.74% of partners.

Elie Mystal writes about it on Above the Law, but what's even more discouraging are many of the  comments that were posted, with the most vitriolic anonymous ? of course. Here are some samples:

* Elie: Knock off the reactionary bullshit and try to analyze these statistics in a rational way.
* Might it be that minority women are bad lawyers?
* Can we take a poll re: how many women have cried at work? I've seen several people cry at a biglaw firm and its always a female. Now that is the type of behavior that will keep you from becoming partner.
* Boo hoo hoo.
* Christ, Mystal, I've refrained from joining the chorus until now, but the continuous stream of minority & liberal interest and identity politics stories is REALLY getting old. Lat, in all seriousness, the site is going downhill here, you need to remember what brought readers around in the first place before you bleed us all off with this tripe.

THIS IS A REAL PROBLEM, FOLKS. The bottom line: law firms (like any other company) will ultimately fail if they do not have diverse personnel who reflect the diverse world we live in. And creating work environments that allow everyone to prosper shouldn't just be a luxury for the wise and prescient.  But how to get there is genuinely challenging. It would be a good start to jettison the posturing and listen respectfully to each other.