By Sara Merken
(Reuters) – A trio of legal industry leaders, including a senior California judge and a top lawyer at Microsoft Corp, said on Thursday that improving diversity in the profession will require change at the leadership level, rethinking law firm compensation and embracing career flexibility.
“It’s especially important that lawyers, as a profession, reflect the society that they serve,” California Supreme Court associate justice Goodwin Liu said during a panel discussion at the Reuters Next conference.
Lawyers have long pushed for greater gender and racial diversity at law firms, corporate legal departments and in the court system. But the industry still lags other professions.
Liu noted a “generational lag,” with a more diverse pipeline of lawyers starting their careers. Female enrollment in U.S. law schools eclipsed male enrollment in 2016, he said.
But another panelist, Microsoft general counsel Dev Stahlkopf, said structural barriers will not be fixed by demographic change alone, such as pressure on women to navigate their careers while raising children. Under 20% of law firm equity partners were women and about 6% were racial or ethnic minorities in 2018, according to the National Association for Law Placement.
Stalkopf said she twice cut her own maternity leave short in order not to miss opportunities at her former law firm.
“With those kinds of barriers, I think many women find themselves either choosing or needing to opt out,” she said.
She noted that Microsoft has had success with a program that rewards its outside law firms’ diversity efforts, with slower progress, though, on diversity in leadership.
Panelist Benjamin Wilson, chairman of the law firm Beveridge & Diamond, said one way law firms can advance diversity at all levels is through compensation, so that lawyers working on a particular matter share credit more equally.
“When that happens the client sees the diverse lawyer differently, the diverse lawyer’s peers at his or her firm see them differently, and most importantly the attorney herself or himself begins to see themselves differently,” he said.
Wilson also cited voluntary pledges by law firms to consider more minorities and women for leadership positions.
Stahlkopf said certain programs are making progress, and the challenge is to improve their reach.
“We as an industry really are going to need to be thinking about how do we scale this broadly,” she said.
(Reporting by Sara Merken; Editing by David Gregorio)
