It’s not hard to find signs of gender bias in the legal industry. A 2018 survey, for example, found that nearly 70% of women of color and 60% of white women said they were paid less than their colleagues with similar seniority and experience, contrasted with 36% of white men who reported the same.

And yet, given those figures and other evidence of disparate treatment of women at law firms, the number of lawsuits targeting Big Law over compensation and promotion policies in the last several years is relatively low. While allegations against Jones Day in two separate 2019 bias suits were explosive, other leading firms didn’t face similarly high-profile suits of systematic discrimination in 2019.