Another Shot

• Author: John Roemer
• Pages: 34-35

Business of Law

34 || ABA JOURNAL MAY 2019

PHOTOS BY DRESSEL-MARTIN MEDIAWORKS, COURTESY OF CAREN ULRICH STACY, MICHELLE R. FANG

Another Shot

After a viral photo showing a firm’s

all-white and nearly all-male partnership class,

businesses double down on mandating diversity

from outside counsel

By John Roemer

In December, Paul, Weiss, Rif kind, Wharton & Ga rrison

got some bad press for what was suppose d to be a happy

occasion. The firm p osted photos of its new partnership

class: 11 white men, and at the fa r end of the bottom row, one

white woman. The pictur e went viral and reignited debate

over the level of racial and gender d iversity, or lack thereof, in the legal

ind ust ry.

“We certainly ca n—and will—do better,” Paul Weiss Chairman Brad K arp

said, apologetical ly. He blamed “an idiosyncr atic demographic pool” and

lamented that “one partic ular year would erase the firm’s diversity a chieve-

ments over the past 75 years.” Ka rp has stated that one part ner in the class

is Latino and another i s LGBTQ. Additionally, a March report f rom the

nonprofit Lawyers of Color found Paul Weiss had the highe st percentage of

African-American lawyers—8.27 percent—among

nearly 400 firms it res earched.

The legal aairs med ia have documented the

reality that women c omprise only 19 percent of

equity part nerships at the biggest firms and that

just 9.1 percent are minorit y partners (the fig-

ures are from Natio nal Law Journal and The

American Law yer).

Other sources back up t hose numbers. “Paul

Weiss became the scapegoat for a problem that i s

bigger than just them,” says the founder and CE O

of Diversity Lab, Ca ren Ulrich Stacy. Her company,

based in the Bay Are a, leverages data, behaviora l

science and technology t o experiment with ideas to

boost diversity a nd inclusion in the law.

Stacy added th at homegrown women—meaning women who joined the

firm as summer and entr y-level associates—and diverse a ttorneys “are not

advancing to par tnership at the same rate as their majorit y counterparts.”

She adds that latera l partner hires are mostly whit e males. “If one or both

of those levers don’t change, great er diversity in the equity ran ks is not

possible.”

As law firms gr apple with surging calls for improved d iversity in their

partnership ra nks, corporate clients have joined the chor us and added to the

pressure in three w ays: the carrot, the stick and moral su asion.

For instance, Microsof t’s decade-old Law Firm Diversit y Program incen-

tivizes inclus ion by oering a bonus to its outside firms that increa se the

diversity of their par tners.

On the other end of the spectr um, Hewlett-Packard Inc.’s diversity

Law Firms

holdback scheme penalizes fi rms that do not

meet its minima l diversity stang require -

ments by withholding 10 percent of invoiced

fees from those that fa il to meet minimal

diverse stang re quirements.

As for moral suasion, the Paul Weiss

photo prompted a January open lett er

signed by 170 general counsels and cor po-

rate legal ocers prote sting that their out-

side firms’ new part ner classes “remain

largely male and la rgely white.” A leader of

that eort, Michelle R . Fang of Turo Inc.,

promises an immi nent follow-up this spring

with more signatur es and an action plan.

The chief legal ocer of the A ssociation

of Corporate Couns el, Susanna McDonald,

says she is impatient for improvement. “I

hope the signers of the letter keep t rack of

the actions firm s take,” she says, noting that

an increasing perc entage of her members

have come from law firms.

Companies that a rmatively try to diver-

sify appear to suc ceed, Microsoft general

counsel Dev Sta hlkopf says. “We’ve seen

quantifiable progres s as a result of our

incentive-based approa ch, and we believe

that these advanc es have increased the

quality of the repres entation we get and

improved our results,” Sta hlkopf says.

Meanwhile, HP executive c ommunica-

tions manager Adr ianna Masuko said in

Caren Ulrich Stac y

Michelle Fang

Susanna McDonald