For black partners, The Am Law 100 is a lonely place. More than a quarter-century after the first national efforts to boost the presence of black lawyers at large firms, African-American partners remain so rare that at most firms, they can be counted on one hand, even though the average Am Law 100 firm has more than doubled in size in the past two decades.
In 2013, only 1.9 percent of partners—one in 54 at the 223 firms that submitted data for our Diversity Scorecard—were black, a percentage that hasn’t changed in five years. For black women partners, the numbers are even worse: They average just one in every 170 partners in our surveyed firms, half the number of black male partners, according to data collected by the National Association for Law Placement.
