Shades of Difference

These are some of the striking results from our first-ever Minority Experience Survey. Each year our sibling publications The American Lawyer and The American Lawyer Student Edition survey midlevel associates and summer associates to get the inside scoop on working at the country’s largest law firms. Law students and young lawyers answer a range of questions about the quality and quantity of their work, the support and feedback provided by their firm, and their overall job satisfaction level. The results are published as the Associates Survey and the Summer Associates Survey.

This year, for the first time, we decided to separate out the responses from minority associates and summer associates on a range of quality of life questions, to see how they compare to responses from their white peers. Our goal was to see whether blacks, Asian Americans, and Hispanics have the same experience at big firms as nonminority lawyers. Of the 5,734 law students at 189 firms who responded to our Summer Associates Survey, 5,014 supplied information about their ethnicity. Of those respondents, 26.4 percent were minorities and 73.6 were white. A total of 5,834 lawyers at 185 firms filled out our Associates Survey; of the 4,711 who gave information about their ethnicity, 14.9 percent were minorities and 85.1 percent were white. (Minorities were categorized separately as African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans. Additional minority groups, such as Native Americans, were collectively categorized as “Other.”) The responses from each minority group for each question were averaged and compared.