Law and Race Commons^™

Race And Rapport: Homophily And Racial Disadvantage In Large Law Firms, Kevin Woodson

Law Faculty Publications

Over the past two decades, clients and other constituencies have pushed large law firms to pursue greater racial diversity in attorney hiring and retention. Although these firms have devoted extraordinary resources toward better recruiting and retaining attorneys of color, and despite a proliferation of “best practices” guides and diversity policy recommendations, these considerable efforts have yielded only modest gains. With respect to black attorneys in particular, the tide of racial progress in these firms has moved forward at a glacial pace, even ebbing and receding in recent years.

Although large law firms now hire significant numbers of black attorneys as …