Large Firms
Aug. 13, 2002
Firms Give No Data on Race, Gender for Economic Layoffs
Have associate layoffs at Bay Area firms in the past year disproportionately affected minorities and women? Though many members of the legal community believe that's an important question to ask, the law firms who have implemented the layoffs aren't providing any answers.
Have associate layoffs at Bay Area firms in the past year disproportionately affected minorities and women?
Though many members of the legal community believe that's an important question to ask, the law firms who have implemented the layoffs aren't providing any answers.
The Daily Journal sent a survey to nine Bay Area-based law firms that have publicly acknowledged laying off attorneys for economic reasons. The survey asked the firms to list their total number of economic-based layoffs in 2001 and 2002 and break down that total by gender and racial makeup.
The survey also asked the firms to provide the gender and racial breakdown of their associate populations before layoffs were implemented.
All nine firms - Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison; Cooley Godward; Crosby, Heafey, Roach & May; Fenwick & West; Gray, Cary, Ware & Freidenrich; Gunderson, Dettmer, Stough, Villeneuve, Franklin & Hachigian; Skjerven Morrill; Venture Law Group; and Pillsbury Winthrop - refused to participate in the survey.
The nine firms combined have laid off more than 400 attorneys for economic reasons in the past year, a total that does not include performance-based layoffs.
With firms that returned calls about the survey, including Brobeck Phleger, Cooley Godward, Gray Cary and Venture Law, the Daily Journal discussed combining the data of all participating firms, thereby keeping anonymous the data of each individual firm.
But representatives of those firms, as well as Pillsbury Winthrop and Crosby Heafey, said that they could not release such confidential data. They said their firms had nothing to hide; it was just a matter of firm policy.
Bay Area legal recruiters generally believe that these firms aren't covering up incriminating data. Several recruiters say that they have not heard any rumblings of complaints about layoff bias and that a clear majority of the résumés they've seen from laid-off attorneys have been from white men.
However, Anna Marie Armstrong, a recruiter at San Francisco's Major, Hagen & Africa, says that she did see an unusually high number of résumés from minorities and women following the massive layoffs.
"Most of the people laid-off tend to be junior people," Armstrong says. "And a high number of minorities and women practice at the lower level, so [the layoffs] could have affected minorities and women more."
Armstrong adds that, as a well-known African-American recruiter, she probably sees more minority résumés than many of her colleagues.
Some laid-off attorneys share a similar perspective.
Several Asian-American women fired by Bay Area law firms in 2001 say that a disproportionate number of associates from their racial group, women in particular, were targeted in the massive layoffs.
"Many people were upset about it, but no one wanted to talk about it openly," says one, who was job searching when interviewed and did not want her name printed.
Asian-Americans account for a sizable chunk of Bay Area associate populations, close to 15 percent at some large firms, according to data compiled by the San Francisco Bar Association.
These women, however, say that their representation in the layoff ranks was too high and even more noticeable when combined with the number of laid-off attorneys of Middle Eastern and Indian descent.
"I still remember asking my friends, 'Do you think something's going on? Is it mostly minority women?'" says another Asian-American woman fired in 2001, who now has an in-house job and who also asked for anonymity. "We all got that impression, but we couldn't officially check it because the firms didn't give the information."
Each attorney admits that she is most familiar with the appearance of bias at her former firm, which experienced heavy layoffs and where she was close friends and colleagues with fellow minority and women attorneys who also were laid off. Neither wanted the name of her former firm printed.
The attorneys also admit to the speculative nature of their information, having never seen an official list of who was laid off from their firms.
They have an even less solid impression of how many African-American and Latino attorneys were laid off. They remember the African-American and Latino populations at their former firms being extremely small to begin with.
According to the Bar Association of San Francisco's "1999 Interim Report: Goals and Timetables for Minority Hiring and Advancement," Bay Area law firms are making greater progress in hiring minority associates than they are in promoting minorities to partnership ranks.
In large firms that participated in the study, minorities accounted for 24 percent of the associate population but just 6 percent of the partner population.
Similarly, women hold 30 percent of all attorney jobs nationwide but just 15 percent of law firm partner positions, according to "The Unfinished Agenda: Women and the Legal Profession," a 2001 report of the American Bar Association.
Some of the factors keeping minorities and women from advancing to partner status may make them more vulnerable during layoffs.
"People prefer to work with others who have similar life experiences," says the Asian-American attorney with the in-house job. "So minorities don't always have the right mentoring relationship."
Mentors can help associates not only with training, career guidance and support for making partner, the attorney says, but also by protecting their jobs during a slowdown. She believes minorities often lack such protection.
Even objective standards for termination, such as billable hours, can be rooted in subjective choices.
As written in the San Francisco Bar Association's goals and timetables report, some minority attorneys believe that work assignments are not made on a colorblind basis.
"[N]umerous minority respondents, across all racial lines, noted the tendency of senior white male attorneys to reach out and 'bring along' more junior white male attorneys," the report states.
Managing partners who participated in the study said that assignments generally were made on a colorblind basis. The report also indicated that many firms have begun implementing "race-neutral" mentoring programs.
"In a tough economy, when the clients start to die out, minorities can be the ones left with no billable hours," the in-house attorney says. "They're not in that tight circle getting work."
She doesn't believe this constitutes outright and purposeful discrimination but a more unintentional bias.
Because practice group leaders often are responsible for selecting whom to terminate from their departments, she adds, managers may not realize how the number of minority or women firings adds up across the whole firm.
Teveia Barnes, president of the San Francisco Bar Association, and Tania Shah Narang, executive director of the California Minority Counsel Program, say that it's logical to employ general theories about minority retention and partnership promotion when examining the recent layoffs. However, both say they are not aware of any bias in the past year, and their organizations are not tracking layoff data.
The National Association for Law Placement, which tracks law firm demographics by city, also has not launched any initiative to track the layoffs by demographic group, according to a representative.
Though speaking primarily for their groups of friends and former colleagues, the Asian-American attorneys believe that their experiences likely apply to many firms.
And, with rumors spreading that the same law firms are considering additional rounds of layoffs in the coming months, they believe now is a good time to discuss the issue of whether minorities and women can be targeted unfairly.
John Ryan
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