Adam Liptak, the New York Times legal columnist reports that law students are demanding more diversity from top notch law firm employers. A group of Stanford Law School students came up with a grading system that rates the diversity of some of the nation’s top law firms. The results say a lot about the profession where half of all law students are women, but only a small percentage of women are active law firm partners at big name firms. ‘“Many of the firms have atrocious, appalling records on diversity,” said Michele Landis Dauber, a law professor at Stanford and the adviser for the project, called Building a Better Legal Profession. The rankings are at www.betterlegalprofession.org,’ the article says. Some major law firms were not diverse when it came to the lawyers that work for them. “In New York, a third of the big firms had no black partners, and an overlapping third no Hispanic ones. Half the firms in Boston had no black partners, and three-quarters no Hispanic ones.” The students working on the Stanford project would like their law school to restrict on-campus recruiting for the law firms who were at the bottom of the diversity rankings. They also will send a copy of the report card to the Fortune 500 companies in-house counsel’s offices with the implication that those businesses should think twice before hiring the low-ranking law firms.
For more information on diversity programs visit www.wardspeaking.com.
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