Hard Times Could Affect Law Firms’ Minority Recruitment Efforts
About a dozen law firm managers interviewed by Legal Times said they don’t intend to invest more money in minority recruitment next year, and they may even trim some costs from the programs.
Laurie Hane, a partner in Morrison & Foerster’s San Francisco office who co-chairs the firm’s diversity committee, said there could be a need to cut expenditures, but not efforts. “I don’t know if we’ll send fewer people when we go places to recruit, or if we’ll serve pizza rather than caviar, but firms can’t just stop diversity recruiting,” Hane told Legal Times (reg. req.).
Many large law firms are cutting back on associate hiring, a development likely to affect minorities too, the story says. “In other words, no firm has really come up with the magic formula to produce a sizable increase in minority or female lawyers—and this isn’t the year that someone’s likely to find it,” according to the article.
