Race, Gender, and Money

In the last decades, the legal profession has looked, from the perspective of law school faculty and administrators, to be making steady progress on gender equity and racial diversity. That progress fades over the years in practice and then hits a hard stop when it comes to the election for equity partnership in large corporate law firms, the brass ring of private practice. As one chapter shows, equity partnerships are “white spaces” (243–59). Black law graduates who have worked hard to gain the right educational credentials from elite law schools stand a decent chance of landing associate positions in “Big Law” (the term used nowadays for corporate practice in gigantic law firms). Ten years later, they will have left their firm because they have been receiving increasingly loud signals that they are not “partnership material.” Denied mentorship opportunities and subjected to overt racism, Black lawyers leave as soon as a viable alternative arises rather than wait until their second-class citizenship is cemented permanently at the firm.Footnote ¹ (243–59) Black lawyers are not the only lawyers of color to leave Big Law; most minority lawyers exit. Asian-American lawyers, for example, often move in-house at corporations, unwilling to deal with the racialized stereotypes of Asian-Americans as technically proficient but socially lacking, reflected in Big Law culture (137–140).

Women fare no better, and not because they tend to leave the full-time workforce voluntarily to start a family, the standard explanation. They earn less than men at every stage. Even in their first job after graduation, in the period preceding transition to parenthood, they earn 88 percent of what men earn. This discrepancy grows with the years. Thirteen years in, they earn 71 percent of men’s average incomes (278–279). And, like lawyers of color, women apparently do not have the “right stuff” to be equity partners in corporate law firms. When it comes to having children, they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Women who choose to have children and want to continue on the partnership track have to struggle between patriarchal societal expectations about being the primary caregiver in their families and inflexible billable hourly requirements that firms insist are essential in the partnership track. Women who choose not to have children fare no better. They are subjected to misogynistic treatment and are passed over for partnership more frequently than men (278–299).

When asked what makes for partnership material, partners at corporate law firms have some difficulty describing “the right stuff.” But the recipe turns out to be simple: Be a White male, from an elite background, with a stay-at-home wife who takes care of the kids (133–164).

And then there are the related problems of economic status and debt. The authors find a strong correlation between the selectivity of the law school attended and the prestige of parents’ occupation. More than two-thirds of top-10 law school graduates are children of parents with graduate education, one dimension of the profound class-based hierarchy underlying law school status. Access to elite schools is produced through a “seemingly meritocratic tournament” through which applicants have converted their privileged social backgrounds into attendance in more selective undergraduate institutions, higher grades, and higher LSAT scores (84–87). Attendance at elite legal institutions, in turn, leads to more prestigious and more highly compensated first jobs, in particular, positions in large corporate law firms, which, down the line, open doors to other positions in elite settings (87–93).

Nelson and his co-authors also document the burden of debt through mid-career. This burden grows as the law school rank decreases (264–265). The burden also falls disproportionately on Black lawyers (261–277). In the late 20^th Century, law school tuition skyrocketed, from approximately $3,800 in 1980 at a private law school to $19,000 in the late 90’s, outflanking inflation (Nelson 32–33, 261). Law school debt grew correspondingly, from approximately $15,000 in the early 1980s to a median debt of $70,000 for the nearly 90 percent of study respondents reporting debt (355). With debt at eye-popping numbers today, it is hard to remember that $70,000 was a significant chunk of change twenty-five years ago. Nelson et al. found that while most respondents remained indebted at mid-career, debt was not evenly distributed among borrowers. Black respondents graduated with more debt than White respondents. Ten years in, the disparity between the amount of debt owed by Back lawyers and the amount owed by other respondents had grown. Only 28 percent of Black lawyers had paid off their debt, as compared to the remaining respondents, 40 percent of whom had paid it off. More than 70 percent of Black lawyers still in debt had barely made a dent in what they owed (356). For many Black lawyers, the authors emphasize, taking on debt to finance a legal career reflects a strategy for upward mobility and wealth accumulation. Because of the patterns of discrimination and racism they encounter, however, they end up paying a much higher price of admission than their White counterparts (276–77).

The authors uncover some bright spots. They describe lawyers in solo practice who find meaning in giving back to their communities and public interest lawyers deeply committed to their clients and causes (173–186; 223–225; 235–237). But, for all the American legal profession’s claims to providing equal opportunities, it is a bastion of traditional White male privilege. The reams of quantitative and qualitative data the authors marshal in support of this fundamental fact go a long way to dispelling the hazy idea that the legal profession provides opportunities in equal measure to all its entrants. It is not, hopes and dreams of parents notwithstanding, “Oh, the places you will go!” (Seuss Reference Seuss1990).

Asked about whether they wanted their children to follow in their footsteps, many study participants expressed doubts or answered no. One observed that he preferred that his daughter end up a “doctor or engineer,” who could “contribute to society on a much larger level.” (337). Another respondent, a Latino lawyer who had become an equity partner in Big Law, noted, “if you are able to get into the top law schools, great. … But this notion of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is there for a very select few, and if you’re not [from a top law school], it’s very difficult to get there.” He added that if a young person likes to do anything besides work all the time, those activities will have to put aside for “a number of years at least” (335–336).

Two Hemispheres – One Profession

The problems of discrimination, exclusion, and economic inequality are baked into the stratified social structure of the American legal profession, which itself works as an engine of inequality, magnifying and entrenching societal patterns. As Nelson et al. confirm, based on their nationwide sample, the private market for legal services is characterized by two hemispheres divided by client type (99–125). John Heinz and Edward Laumann first made this observation about the Chicago bar fifty years ago, and replicated it with colleagues Rebecca Sandefur and Robert Nelson twenty years later (Heinz and Laumann Reference Heinz and Laumann1982, 170–175; Heinz et al. Reference Heinz, Nelson, Sandefur and Laumann2005, 41–44). Now, as then, there are two spheres of practice. In one hemisphere, lawyers come from elite law schools, practice in huge firms, and specialize in business-related areas. In the other, the “People Law” hemisphere, lawyers come from lower-ranked law schools, work in small firms or solo settings, and practice in areas relevant to their clients, such as criminal defense, family law, and estate planning. Rarely does a lawyer cross from one hemisphere to the other; occasionally, a lawyer will move from a big firm to a smaller practice, but not the other way around (Nelson et al. 64–65). And while the American legal profession can be characterized as two hemispheres, they are not the same size. In the 1970’s, Heinz and Laumann found that the hemispheres were roughly equal in terms of lawyer effort. Twenty years later, business clients had grown to represent almost two-thirds of lawyers’ efforts, and they continue to be the predominant clients today (Heinz & Laumann Reference Heinz and Laumann1982, 130; Heinz et al. Reference Heinz, Nelson, Sandefur and Laumann2005, 41–44, Nelson et al. 109, 125).

The differences in client types are manifested in growing earnings inequality between the lawyers in each hemisphere of private practice. Until the end of the 20^th century, data on entry-level salaries collected by the National Association of Law Placement reflected a basic bell curve. In 2000, NALP first reported a bimodal curve in the salaries of new hires, as some graduates began to be compensated significantly more than the median to work in corporate law firms. While half of new lawyers received salaries in the $30,000 to $50,000 range, another 14 percent reported receiving $125,000. As the salaries of new corporate law associates continued to grow, the distance between the curves increased. Fast forward to today: Starting salaries at the lower end have risen slowly. At the higher end, they have nearly doubled (NALP 2025). Reflecting similar income inequality, fifteen years into their careers, the top quartile of lawyers in Nelson et al.’s cohort earned 52 percent of total earnings, and six times as much as the earnings reported by practitioners in the lower quartile (Nelson 110).Footnote ²

Despite the significant differences between corporate clients served by behemoth law firms and the individual clients served by small firms and solo practitioners, American lawyers insist they form a single profession. Whether they end up in People Law or Big Law, all lawyers are subject to the same educational and licensing requirements, including that they typically study full-time for three years at an accredited law school. And they are bound by the same ethics rules, which subordinate all other interests to the interests of clients. All of this is undergirded by unquestioning adherence to a broad professional ideology under which the lawyer is the guarantor of fundamental freedoms in the American adversarial system of justice (Kessler Reference Kessler2017). This ideology has long held that lawyers are required to be partisan on behalf of their clients’ interests, and that they are not responsible for the outcomes of their representation. Responsibility for the results is left to a neutral arbiter (Bloomfield Reference Bloomfield1976, 343; Landsman Reference Landsman1984).

For both types of lawyers, believing you are all on the same team, serving clients single-mindedly to advance the larger goal of justice, has powerful ideological benefits. For lawyers in people law, association with this ideal—and by extension corporate lawyers on the other side of the divide—elevates the standing of their work and allows them to share in the prestige, reputation, and high visibility of the elite bar—even if it means bearing the high costs of three years of legal education and then being forced to compete in a market for the business of an increasingly shrinking number of people who can afford their services (Henderson Reference Henderson2024; Chambliss Reference Chambliss2025).

For Big Law, the ideological stakes are different. The idea of a single profession rooted in the individual lawyer defending the freedom of his client has, at least since the late 19^th century, allowed corporate lawyers to obfuscate their close identification with business interests (Funk Reference Funk2025, 280–282; Gordon Reference Gordon and Gerard1984, 66). In recent years, the need for professional cover has been greater than ever, lest anyone look too closely at what corporate lawyers actually do for their paying clients. Since the 1980’s, at least, they have dedicated their services on behalf of paying clients to weakening public systems of accountability under the banner of adversarial ethics. The idea of a single profession—and the ideology of zealous advocacy that undergirds it—has shielded from view corporate law firms’ sustained efforts to shape the law to favor corporate interests (for example, Albiston Reference Albiston2010). Corporate law firms also have limited access to courts for individuals who seek to hold corporations to account for wrongdoing. By corporatizing civil procedure and elevating private arbitration agreements, they have persuaded federal courts to close their doors to individual claimants (Glover Reference Glover2017; Resnik Reference Resnik2015).

Neutral partisanship has also served as the cover for corporate firms’ global transactional work, which in the last half-century has become a principal profit driver in Big Law (Turner Reference Turner2022; Holmström and Kaplan Reference Holmström and Kaplan2001). Through highly complex and hidden transactions, corporate lawyers have used the primacy of private law in the Anglo-American legal system to exempt their clients from public requirements of legality (Pistor Reference Pistor2019). They have created enormous multinational corporations with opaque ownership structures to arbitrage global regulatory regimes to obtain tax advantages and avoid civil liability (Palan, Reference Palan2025). They have also deployed corporate legal personality to construct ownership structures that obscure beneficial ownership and circumvent the ordinary priority scheme of bankruptcy law (Moon Reference Moon2022; Roe and Tung Reference Roe and Tung2013). If, by advancing the interests of their clients above all others, corporate lawyers are merely obeying the general injunction to put clients’ interests first, then it’s hard to find what’s objectionable in this work.

Legal academics, dazzled by Big Law’s proximity to power and money, have been enlisted in preserving its virtue. When individual corporate lawyers lapse into blatantly unethical or illegal conduct, scholars have sought to understand the origin of their fall and considered how firms might do better (for example, Rostain and Regan Reference Rostain and Regan2014). Much scholarly ink has also been spilled seeking to improve the quantity and quality of law firms’ modest, if steady, stream of pro bono (for example, Cummings and Rhode Reference Cummings and Rhode2010) Yet it does not seem to have occurred to anyone that the fact that law firm pro bono is devoted to a very narrow band of matters—designed to avoid by a wide margin the interests of corporate clients—might be a reason to question the value of the enterprise to begin with (Rostain Reference Rostain2027).

Legal Education

The professional socialization glue that binds the two hemispheres of practice together is the three-year JD. When first adopted by the ABA, the required three years of full-time study was not tied to any specific curricular content (ABA Special Committee Report 1921), and today the requirement is only loosely, if at all, connected with the knowledge and skills required to hang a shingle (Kennedy Reference Kennedy1983).Footnote ³ Had the American Bar Association, one hundred years ago, accepted the recommendation of Alfred Reed, the researcher tasked by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Education to investigate professional educational requirements, the legal profession would be pluralistic, with different training paths of different lengths and leading to different practice areas and careers (Reed Reference Reed1921, Stevens Reference Stevens2001). Instead, the ABA landed on three years of full-time study (for night school, whose “democratic necessity” was grudgingly acknowledged, four years) at a law school with a sufficient number of full-time faculty and an adequate library, as a requirement for entrance to the bar (ABA Special Committee Report 1921). Elihu Root, the head of the ABA’s Special Committee on Legal Education (and a titan of the bar), argued that broad university-based formation was required to handle the challenges of increasingly complex regulatory regimes (Strawn Reference Strawn1927). The requirement of three-year post-graduate study—the four years of medical school were not far from their minds (Gordon Reference Gordon, Grossberg and Tomlins2008, 78)—allowed lawyers to associate themselves with elite university learning and distinguish themselves, on the one hand, from the mercenary preoccupations of their business clients, and, on the other, from the “immigrant hordes” flooding urban law practice, who could ill afford three years of full-time study (Auerbach Reference Auerbach1976, 110–120; Gordon Reference Gordon, Grossberg and Tomlins2008, 77–79).

The three-year full-time requirement stuck. Every few decades, during tumultuous political or economic times, doubts about its value arise. The question came up in the early 1970’s as part of a larger examination of law schools’ role in entrenching the status quo during a period of student activism and political upheaval (Stevens Reference Stevens2001, 232). Elite law school faculty won the day, defeating a proposal for a shorter curriculum by arguing that lowering the requirement would precipitate a race to the bottom—vocational school. Generalist elite professional formation, requiring a full three years of full-time study, was needed to train the policy makers, judges, and leaders of the future that all law schools imagined they were producing.

The question reared its head again in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis. In 2009, 88 percent of graduates reported finding employment, but nearly a quarter of the jobs were temporary, many created by law schools to mitigate the impact of the recession for their graduates (NALP 2010). Corporate law firms, intent on protecting partner profits, were quietly laying off thousands of associates (Sparkman Reference Sparkman2011). Into this crisis leapt Brian Tamanaha with Failing Law Schools (Tamanaha, Reference Tamanaha2012). The book, which won him few friends in the legal academy, was an indictment of the cozy arrangement between law schools and the ABA to protect law school revenue and faculty entitlements. As Tamanaha argued, accreditation requirements like the three-year degree, tenure for faculty (for scholarship of dubious benefit in training students), and low teaching loads drove up law school costs. These costs were covered by rising tuition, which depended on the flow of generous federal lending with favorable income-based repayment options. Tamanaha argued for looser rules to free law schools to experiment with different educational approaches and provide more affordable models of legal education. In his view, the handful of elite schools that enjoyed a stable economic model (and presumably produced worthwhile scholarship) could remain the same. Relaxed accreditation standards would permit lower-ranked schools, whose economic model was unsustainable, to develop two-year curricula, abolish tenure, require higher teaching loads, and use more adjuncts to deliver training to law students not headed for lucrative corporate careers.

For a hot minute, the ABA considered the idea of eliminating the required third year. It pivoted instead to increasing required “experiential learning” credits to produce more “practice-ready” graduates going into People Law. Experiential training of the sort envisioned by the ABA was, by and large, irrelevant to graduates of elite law schools headed to Big Law, where knowledge of client-centered counseling adds little to sixty-hour work weeks of relentless document management and review. (Today, corporate clients refuse to pay for first-year associates’ time, whether or not they received experiential training in law school (Association of Corporate Counsel n.d.).) Never mind that there were no data suggesting that experiential training correlated with improved employment outcomes—the organized bar has never let empirical evidence get in the way of a good storyFootnote ⁴ (Chilton et al., Reference Chilton, Hovenkamp, Joy and Rozema2025; Rostain and Teufel Reference Rostain and Teufel2024; Chambliss Reference Chambliss2019). The ABA and legal academy successfully absorbed the structural critique of legal education and its unstable economic arrangement by recasting, in the name of consumer protection, the project of professional formation, which originally involved broad book and lecture-based learning, as one of producing lawyers with more “competencies.” A very modest amount of experiential training could have students doing (or pretending in simulation courses to do) in idealized conditions the things lawyers were supposed to be doing in practice, even if the competitive realities arguably left little time to implement any of the lessons learned (Seron Reference Seron1996; Van Hoy Reference Van Hoy1997). By requiring “practice competencies,” the ABA could concede that many lawyers were in private practice representing real people while safely ignoring the deeper socio-economic stratification reflected in the two hemispheres of practice.

Pressures at the Top

If the model of legal education has for some time been under strain for lower-tier schools, these days the T14—the cluster of schools at the top of the rankings—may be beginning to feel pressure.Footnote ⁵ The stable economics that underlie their model may no longer be a given. Today, the cost of attending a T-14 is quickly approaching half a million dollars (Patrice Reference Patrice2025). Federal loans, which until recently covered all tuition costs for students without access to family wealth, will now be capped and impose more onerous loan repayment obligations (Sloan Reference Sloan2026b; Douglas-Gabriel and Picchi Reference Douglas-Gabriel and Picchi2025). While many students draw on the wealth of their upper-class families to pay as they go, elite schools also enroll large numbers of students who take out substantial loans to cover their costs, to support their claim to be meritocracies (Nelson 355). Shifting to a higher concentration of students who can pay their own way would undermine the elite’s claim that the T-14’s are equalizing opportunities for students with different socio-economic backgrounds.

The financial arrangements between the elite legal academy and corporate practice, which have enabled the former to overlook how deeply it is embedded in and reinforces the profession’s social hierarchy, may also be beginning to unravel. The T-14 has long depended on sending 60 percent of its graduates to Big Law to repay their debt, which today can often exceed $400,000 (LawHub 2024)—for purposes of comparison, the percentage going to corporate firms drops precipitously for schools ranked below, in the 15 to 50 spots, where the average hired into Big Law is 33 percent (Sloan Reference Sloan2026a; Law School Admission Council 2026b; NALP 2025)—and going into Big Law is how most of the T-14 graduates are able by mid-career to repay their loans (Nelson, 355–56). This long-standing deal risks being upended with the rise of AI, which is improving at breakneck speed. Large language models, in the form of proprietary platforms tied to legal databases through retrieval augmented generation, are increasingly good at generating work product of the type once assigned to low and even mid-level associates.

The earlier version of this narrative—circa 2023—had AI displacing the newest associates by engaging in rote tasks much more quickly and at the same level of quality. The idea was that so long as someone competent actually checked the sources produced by AI, the problems of hallucination and overconfidence that plagued the first systems released could be addressed (Magesh et al. Reference Magesh, Surani, Dahl, Suzgun, Manning and Ho2025). Commentators predicted that the corporate law firm organizational structure, currently a pyramid, would take on a different shape – perhaps a diamond, starfish, or cylinder (Rapoport and Tiano Reference Rapoport and Tiano2025). It is still too early to tell, but hiring at Big Law, which recently has slowed for new graduates and risen for more experienced associates, looks to be bearing out this prediction. The result may be a pyramid precariously perched on top of a narrow base consisting of a small number of entry-level and junior associates (Sloan Reference Sloan2025c; Thomson Reuters Institute 2025).Footnote ⁶

The more recent version of this narrative is that AI, especially in the hands of experienced lawyers, will not just speed up routine tasks, but produce superior work product than associates. AI proponents cite as use cases: document review, summary, and analysis, legal research, and brief and memo drafting—all tasks assigned to associates. It is true that many of the superpowers claimed for AI sound like the hype of an overheated market, but frontier models, unleashed to roam the World Wide Web while also incorporating reasoning functions and tethered to a legal corpus, can generate novel ideas at an unprecedented rate. In the hands of an experienced lawyer who can distinguish plausible legal arguments from bunk, AI can produce original insights supported by exhaustive research.Footnote ⁷ Put simply, it is a creative, verbose, and manic assistant who is extremely organized, engages in long flights of reasoning, and should never, ever, be taken at its word.Footnote ⁸ And that is how the majority of lawyers in Big Law are beginning to use it (Penton Reference Penton2026). Recent months have also seen “AI native” law firms pop up, which claim to build AI into their workflow at every stage (Killelea Reference Killelea2026; Lat Reference Lat2026).

No one has a crystal ball to predict which sector of legal practice will be most transformed by generative AI, but almost every sector will be affected. Big Law practice, which represents approximately $150 billion in the US legal market, does not put a premium on the warm handshake or face-to-face conversation (Lat Reference Lat2023). Its workflow—built around huge teams with defined responsibilities in connection with large and highly complex matters—looks eminently automatable if done carefully with sophisticated tools. Big Tech has recently reorganized its workflow around AI-based automation, laying off nearly100,000 employees through the spring of 2026; in the case of Meta’s cuts, they represented 10 percent of its workforce (Guardian 2026). It is hard to see why corporate law firms, under pressure from corporate clients that will not subsidize the training of associates, wouldn’t begin to take similar steps.

Concerns about the continued sustainability of sending large numbers of associates to Big Law may be enough to prompt elite law schools to begin to rethink their business models—admittedly not an easy task. On top of the increasingly unstable economics, the sheen of Big Law practice may be wearing off. Maintaining the pretense that elite schools are sending their graduates to organizations embodying the highest professional ideals is becoming more difficult. Political pressure has led several prestigious corporate law firms to cave to blatantly unconstitutional demands from the Administration (O’Brien Reference O’Brien2025). Many more are avoiding representation of clients in matters that might rub the Administration the wrong way, revealing that maintaining obscenely high profits for partners is their one priority (Scarcella, Thomas, and Sloan Reference Scarcella, Thomas and Sloan2025). Never profiles in courage, corporate law firms are no longer even trying to keep up the appearance of acting as independent advocates, willing, at the risk of alienating their paying clients, to accept cases for free in the service of higher professional ideals.

In a move that hits closer to home, corporate firms have shifted hiring for second year summer jobs, the entry point for positions post-graduation, to the middle of the first semester of law school, even before a student has taken a single exam or received a single grade, in some instances providing substantial “signing bonuses” obligating students to show up at the firm in their 2L summer (Lat Reference Lat2025). This change speaks volumes to Big Law’s complete disdain for their associates’ professional aspirations or for the conceit that the learning experiences provided by law schools might have some bearing on students’ suitability for corporate practice. To Big Law, elite law schools are merely sorting mechanisms, whose competitive application processes save firms the work of identifying the most driven, obsessionally perfectionist, and hardest-working drones. (With this initial sorting done, law firms use LSAT scores and students’ self-presentation in interviews to determine whether they have the “right stuff” to merit an offer.)

All of this may begin to make corporate practice a harder sell to law school applicants and students, many of whom might have imagined that it would allow them to flourish as professionals while earning a lot of money.Footnote ⁹ Or, maybe not. They would need to read the fine print.Footnote ¹⁰