The American Lawyer (excerpts)

Large U.S. law firms became less diverse last year. That's the key finding to emerge from the latest version of our annual Diversity Scorecard, which counts attorneys of color in the U.S. offices of some 200 big firms. In each of the previous nine years that we've compiled the Scorecard, the percentage of minority attorneys at all participating firms increased, rising from less than 10 percent in 2000 to 13.9 percent in 2008. In 2009, for the first time, that proportion dipped, to 13.4 percent.

The drop in law firm diversity may be small, but it's important. Overall, big firms shed 6 percent of their attorneys between 2008 and 2009 -- and, amid the bloodletting, lost 9 percent of their minority lawyers. (Here and elsewhere in this story, we've calculated such percentages only for the 191 firms that provided numbers in both years, in order to have a consistent basis for comparison.) Diversity advocates call the drop a warning sign that shouldn't be ignored. "I think [that] when you're looking at any numbers of a population you're trying to increase, and you see a decrease, that's significant," says Venu Gupta, executive director of the Chicago Committee on Minorities in Large Law Firms. "I guess I hoped we wouldn't be going backward," echoes Fred Alvarez, chair of the American Bar Association Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Profession and a Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati partner.

This year's results have shaken up our Scorecard rankings, which are based on the firms' percentage of all minority lawyers as well as their percentage of minority partners. Alvarez's firm, Wilson Sonsini, held its No. 1 spot, but some of last year's top-ranked firms didn't fare so well. Those firms include Townsend and Townsend and Crew (which dropped from second to 14th) and Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy (from 10th to 17th). Townsend says that it continues to keep a close eye on its diversity numbers; Milbank says that its percentage of minority attorneys has held steady at 23 percent, once its new entering class is taken into account.

Several firms bucked the overall trend, rising in the rankings thanks to improved minority lawyer numbers. Among them: Chadbourne & Parke (going from 62nd to 29th) and White & Case (from ninth to fourth). These firms trimmed lawyers, but managed not to lose a disproportionate share of minority lawyers .

We compiled the Diversity Scorecard by sending our survey to 249 firms from The Am Law 200 and The NLJ 250, asking for their lawyer numbers as of Sept. 30, 2009. All told, 202 firms responded, down from last year's 210. (Three firms that responded last year have since gone out of business or merged with other firms.) Overall head count at the 191 firms who responded both this year and last dipped by 6 percent, or by 5,834 lawyers. There were 4,543 fewer white lawyers, 10 percent fewer nonpartners of all races, and 1 percent more partners of all races.

The data shows that, while minority lawyers as a whole lost ground, not all groups were affected equally. In proportional terms, African-Americans lost the most: the percentage of all black lawyers fell by 13 percent (462 lawyers), with the number of black nonpartners sliding by a startling 16 percent. Translation: Almost one in six African-American nonpartners left the surveyed firms in the space of a year without being replaced [see "In Retreat"].

In raw numbers, Asian-Americans dropped the most, by 9 percent (556 lawyers). The number of Asian-American nonpartners dropped by 11 percent, while the number of partners rose by 6 percent. As for Hispanic lawyers, their numbers dropped by 9 percent overall (282 lawyers). Hispanic nonpartners fell by 13 percent; partners rose by 3 percent.

The declines in minority attorneys were not evenly spread across firms. About a third saw no decrease, while 31 firms saw decreases of 20 percent or more. The biggest decliners in percentage, including Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson; Gibbons; Kilpatrick Stockton; and Milbank, lost more than a third of their minority attorneys. (Gibbons and Kilpatrick say they remain strongly committed to their diversity programs; Fried Frank did not respond to a request for comment.) While general head count also went down at almost all 31 of those firms, in every case it was outpaced by the percentage drop in minority lawyers.

It would seem logical that the losses in the minority lawyer population are linked to the widespread job cuts at large law firms in 2008 and 2009. But we can't draw that conclusion definitively without collecting a demographic breakdown of all of the attorneys fired for economic reasons -- a project beyond the scope of this survey. However, our data shows a strong correlation between firms that drastically cut overall head count and firms that saw significant losses of minority lawyers.