Nikia Gray, Kyle Rozema, & Danielle Taylor, Who Enters the Pipeline to Partnership at Leading American Law Firms? (Dec. 13, 2025), available at SSRN.
Equity partners at America’s leading law firms occupy positions of extraordinary wealth, influence, and prestige atop the legal profession. Who reaches those positions, and through which pathways, is a revealing measure of how open and inclusive the profession is and has accordingly received extensive attention in both legal scholarship and the popular press. There has been less attention, however, to which new attorneys land the types of positions that plausibly place them on the path to partnership.
Gray, Rozema, and Taylor’s important new study, Who Enters the Pipeline to Partnership at Leading American Law Firms?, addresses this gap, using three decades of data from the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) to track the first jobs of over 1.2 million law school graduates between 1992 and 2023. They focus on the elite entry-level “pipeline” positions in which a large majority of partners at top law firms begin their careers—a set that primarily consists of associate positions at firms with more than 250 attorneys, but also similar positions at mid-sized firms that pay comparable salaries and federal judicial clerkships. The result is the most comprehensive empirical portrait yet assembled of who enters the pipeline to elite legal leadership and how the pipeline has changed over time.
The paper documents that the market for pipeline positions is extraordinarily concentrated among a small number of elite law schools. This will surprise few readers, given the well-documented tendency of elite employers to recruit from the most selective law schools.1 But rigorously establishing and quantifying this pattern over time is useful nonetheless. The top nineteen feeder schools produce sixteen percent of all graduates but fill fifty-three percent of pipeline positions. Three schools alone account for fifteen percent of pipeline positions despite producing just four percent of all law school graduates. Meanwhile, ninety-two lower-ranked schools produce thirty percent of graduates but fill only five percent of pipeline positions. These findings are particularly significant in light of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in SFFA v. Harvard, which bars race-conscious admissions and therefore threatens to reduce underrepresented minority enrollment at the feeder schools. The paper thus provides a baseline against which the effects of that decision can and should be measured.
The paper’s findings on gender and racial representation offer valuable contributions to the scholarship on diversity in the legal profession. Gender diversity increased substantially over the period covered in the study, from women constituting forty-two percent of attorneys in pipeline positions in 1992 to fifty-five percent in 2023. These gains generally tracked women’s rising share of overall law school graduates, but accelerated following the #MeToo movement, from 2016 to 2023.
Attorneys from underrepresented minority (URM) groups made even more substantial progress into pipeline positions. Their share of these positions more than tripled, from under seven percent in 1992 to nearly twenty-two percent in 2023, though they remained underrepresented relative to their share of law school graduates by roughly two to six percentage points in most years. As with gender diversity, this long-run increase in racial diversity largely tracked growth in the URM share of law school graduates. But the authors also document two more recent trends. Starting around the mid-2010s, leading law firms expanded the range of schools from which they recruited URM graduates. The share of schools placing URM women in pipeline positions, for example, increased from forty-two to seventy-seven percent between 2013 and 2023. And in the recruiting cycles following the racial reckoning of 2020, URM graduates achieved higher placement rates than their non-URM peers who had attended the same law schools. Whether this pattern will persist after SFFA v. Harvard remains to be seen.
Gains in associate diversity have not translated proportionately to gains in partnership diversity. Longitudinal follow-up studies tracking the careers of the attorneys in this sample over time could help illuminate where and why that gap emerges. Disaggregating the pipeline categories could also be valuable, as these positions are quite heterogeneous. Some federal clerkships and firm positions are far more competitive and prestigious than others and may be more likely to eventually lead to partnership at top firms and other rewards. Aggregate diversity numbers based on broad categories of pipeline positions may obscure variation that is critical to understanding who ultimately reaches the highest levels of the profession.
Ultimately, this paper may have captured the end of an era. The legal profession saw decades of progress toward greater diversity in the elite pipeline positions, driven first by expanding access to legal education and more recently by deliberate changes in how leading firms recruit, both of which now face serious headwinds. The first two admissions cycles since SFFA have already produced significant declines in Black student enrollment at some highly ranked law schools and striking year-to-year volatility, suggesting that law schools are still actively recalibrating their admissions practices in its wake. The downstream pipeline effects of those changes will begin affecting employment outcomes within the next few years, and this paper’s framework is well positioned to track them. At the same time, the Trump administration, the EEOC, and aligned anti-DEI activists have placed intense pressure on law firms to curtail their diversity efforts, pushing firms to end or restructure minority pipeline programs and demanding information about hiring decisions—changes that have already altered summer associate recruiting at several firms and whose full effects on the pipeline remain to be seen. In that sense, this paper may be both a landmark contribution to the empirical literature on diversity and access in law and a historical record of what proves to be the twilight of the diversity era in the upper reaches of the profession.
- Robert L. Nelson et al., The Making of Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession (2023); Jeremy D. Fogel, Mary S. Hoopes & Goodwin Liu, Law Clerk Selection and Diversity: Insights from Fifty Sitting Judges of the Federal Courts of Appeals, 137 Harv. L. Rev. 588 (2023).
