Law Firm Demographics — or Why John Grisham Has No Idea What He’s Talking About
Posted on October 27, 2009 at 9:07 pm by kyliu
Tags: absurd, bookreviews, john grisham, law
Filed Under read | 1 Comment |
I like Grisham, really, I do. I think he’s got a great sense of narrative and pacing — skills that I certainly can use more of — and he’s pretty careful with his research. But he skims on some very obvious things, like the demographics of associates at large law firms.
Here’s what he writes in The Associate:
In the “Diversity” section [of the recruiting propaganda of Scully & Pershing, the world’s "largest law firm",] there was a breakdown of their class: Male, 71, Female, 32; Caucasian, 75, African-American, 13, Hispanic, 7, Asian, 5, Other, 3; Protestant, 58, Catholic, 22, Jewish, 9, Muslim, 2, Undeclared, 12.
Let’s compare this to the recruiting demographics propaganda published by Baker & McKenzie, truly the world’s “largest law firm”:
Associates (2007) [The “New Hires” chart shows similar trends]
| Men | Women | |
|---|---|---|
| White/Caucasian | 123 | 128 |
| African-American/Black | 6 | 9 |
| Hispanic/Latino | 14 | 8 |
| Alaska Native/American Indian | n/a | n/a |
| Asian | 19 | 33 |
| Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander | n/a | n/a |
| Multiracial | n/a | n/a |
| Openly GLBT | 3 | 1 |
| Attorneys with disabilities | n/a | n/a |
| Total | 162 | 178 |
Ignore, for a minute, the nonsense that the “Total” row represents — what can it possibly mean to sum up “Openly GLBT” with “White/Caucasian”? — I told you lawyers are not very good with numbers — do you see how these numbers differ from Grisham’s numbers?
First, Grisham gets the “diversity” categories wrong. I’ve never been much of a fan of this business of racial classifications, but the classifying and divvying up of people is a very exact science at elite American law firms, and if he wants to expose you to that aspect of firm policy-making, he needs to use the right and trendy categories to give you an accurate picture of how law firms think about this.
Second, the modern large Wall Street law firm’s junior associate ranks are far more female, far more “Asian” (whatever that term means), and far more female & Asian, than Grisham seems to realize.
This is not some shocking discovery. It has been a trend going on for many years (and it causes plenty of tension among law school students and law firm associates). You would certainly know this by walking through the campuses of any of the top law schools in this country. Above the Law captures this in its typically snarky & crass way by noting that Davis Polk & Wardwell, another Wall Street bastion, has “enough comely Asian females to cast Memoirs of a Geisha.”
This does not mean, of course, that Asians, females, or Asian females are doing particularly well at these law firms when you are talking about positions of power (assuming, for the moment, that you think counting group “representation” in this way is even meaningful). But nevertheless Grisham’s picture is just flat out wrong.
Moreover, the idea that modern law firms would focus on “diversity” in the form of the religious affiliation of its new hires is preposterous. Religion has long ceased to be a weighty “diversity” consideration among elites. And in any event, as anyone who has spent any time around law schools or large law firms would know, the idea that out of a 100 or so top graduates from this nation’s top law schools, only 9 would be Jewish, is absurd.
Finally, Grisham neglects the latest trend in “diversity” categories: the “openly GLBT” category. Granted, the law firms don’t quite know how to do this properly either, which is why you have that comical chart I reproduce above, with GLBT represented as a “race” exclusive of other choices. But again, this is how “diversity” is actually practiced.
In case you want more data, here’s comparable information from Skadden Arps (which Grisham was worried might be confused with the fictional Scully & Pershing):
This is not rocket surgery research. It takes about two seconds of Googling. It’s inexcusable that Grisham couldn’t get this very simple issue right.
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Where in the world did Grisham get his numbers? And what, exactly, was his point in putting those types of numbers out there?