But in an era where the right has made the term more or less synonymous with racial diversity, law firms again defy the definition, because BigLaw remains overwhelmingly male and blindingly white. Less than a quarter of equity partners at U.S. law firms are women; nine percent of equity partners are people of color. In 2020, the percentage of all partners who are people of color cracked double digits for the first time in history. At the very least, if firms were the engines of liberal hegemony that critics imagine, you might expect them to have hired more than a few non-elderly white guys during the process.
— Jay Willis of Balls and Strikes, responding to David Lat’s Boston Globe piece about Biglaw “cancel culture.” We discussed that Biglaw is less “woke” than it is a business, but Willis also hones in on all the places where the industry fails to live up to whatever “wokeness” means.
