Nearly a half-century after the civil-rights movement began, the legal industry still is suffering from a dearth of minority attorneys, according to a forthcoming report by the American Bar Association's Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Profession. The report, to be released next month, finds that fewer than 10% of the nation's 1 million attorneys are minorities. Minority partners make up barely 3.7% of all partners at U.S. law firms. Minority representation in the legal field lags behind other influential professions. African-Americans and Hispanics make up 9.2% of attorneys, compared with 14.9% of accountants, 10.2% of professors and 10.2% of physicians, according to the report and U.S. Census Bureau figures. "The statistics are shocking," says Elizabeth Chambliss, a law professor at New York Law School, who wrote the ABA report. "Given all the attention paid to affirmative action, one might imagine that the legal profession would have made more progress." [more
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