Latest Law Firm Diversity Numbers Tell Two Stories

By James Leipold

Last week the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) released its annual Report on Diversity in U.S. Law Firms based on demographic data from its “2025 NALP Directory of Legal Employers”. The results are sobering, if not surprising, on several fronts.

A Decline in Law Firm Diversity

First, and most importantly, the report documents that the proportion of people of color among summer associates, associates, and all lawyers declined in 2025. For context, NALP has been compiling legal practice demographic data since 1991, and these numbers had moved steadily upwards, albeit often very slowly, year after year. To see these numbers now clearly having reversed, that longstanding historic trend is discouraging, but not necessarily surprising given the current socio-political climate in the U.S. Law firms, as has been widely reported, have faced tough federal government scrutiny over their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

A Decrease in Firms Reporting Demographic Data

Which leads us to the second story stemming from the new NALP report. A significant number of law firms that have historically included lawyer demographic data in their NALP directory listing failed to do so this year. According to NALP, 230 fewer law offices provided demographic data in 2025. That means there was a loss of demographic data on about 31,000 lawyers. It also means that the new data, as NALP makes clear, needs to be interpreted with caution. The 2025 data is not directly comparable to the data collected in 2024 because the latest data set contains information on at least 47 fewer law firms. This does not mean that the racial and ethnic diversity of lawyers, associates, and summer associates at large law firms did not go down last year. Given the rich data that was collected by NALP, we know that the representation of lawyers of color did decline. The shift in the reporting base just makes it hard to pin-point exactly by how much that representation went down compared to last year.

But the biggest story by far is the decline in the willingness of law firms to report this data. In writing about the new report from NALP, Reuters leads with this: “Nearly 50 U.S. law firms that previously provided demographic data about their lawyers to an organization that tracks it declined to do so this year, the group said, attributing the drop to a crackdown on law firm diversity, equity and inclusion efforts since President Donald Trump returned to office.”

The Importance of Demographic Data

NALP itself is crystal clear about both the reasons for the change and the significance of the change. Nikia Gray, NALP’s executive director, writes that “This new reluctance [on the part of law firms to report the demographic information about their lawyers] should concern all of us. Demographic data is not merely a collection of numbers. It represents real people, real experiences, and real disparities ... The story of this era can be one of loss, retrenchment, and diminished visibility — or one of principled leadership, courage, and renewed commitment to understanding the shifting portrait of our profession. The choice begins, though, with ensuring that the data does not vanish. NALP will continue to call on all legal employers to participate fully in demographic reporting, starting with providing demographic information as part of their NDLE listing.”

One of the most important roles that nonprofit organizations like NALP and LSAC play is to hold a mirror up to the industry and the profession by collecting and publishing demographic data about law school applicants, matriculants, and graduates, as well as lawyers in the profession. The risk of losing our ability to say, “this is what the profession looks like” is huge. I applaud NALP’s commitment to continuing to urge law firms to report this important data, despite the pressures they currently face not to do so. Similarly, I applaud LSAC’s commitment to collecting and reporting data about the demographics of the law school applicant pool. It is incredibly scary to me to imagine a world in which we cannot say whether the pool of law school applicants is diverse, or whether the lawyers hired by law firms represent a diverse group of people, but I do understand now in 2026 that future is, in fact, possible. All of us have a vested interest in working in whatever ways we can to ensure that day never arrives.

Report Highlights

Other highlights from the most recent “NALP Report on Law Firm Diversity” include these:

• Women Lawyers at Law Firms
  • Women comprised the majority of associates for the first time in 2023, and their representation continues to grow, reaching 52.09% of all associates in 2025 (a 0.5-percentage point year-over year increase).
  • The share of women partners grew by 0.7 percentage points in 2025 to a new record high of 29.55%. Nevertheless, women remain significantly underrepresented within the partnership ranks.
  • Although women still comprise a majority of summer associates, for the second year in a row their representation declined, this year decreasing by 0.2 percentage points to 55.26%.
• Lawyers of Color at Law Firms
  • The percentage of associates of color fell by 1.3 percentage points to 30.20%, the first decline since 2010. This decrease was observed across nearly all firm sizes, except for firms of 251-500 lawyers. By race/ethnicity, much of this decline can be attributed to a decrease in the representation of Asian and Black associates. The proportion of Asian associates fell by 1.6 percentage points, to 11.70%, while the share of Black associates fell by 0.2 percentage points to 6.18%. These figures represent the lowest recorded since 2018 and 2015, respectively.
  • The representation of partners of color was virtually unchanged in 2025 at 12.67%, compared to 12.73% in 2024. However, representation of Black partners declined by 0.2 percentage points, to 2.42%, marking the first decrease since 2014. Following a record high of 43.07% in 2024, the proportion of summer associates of color fell by 5.5 percentage points to 37.53% in 2025, the lowest level recorded since 2020. Among summer associates of color, representation declined across nearly every racial/ethnic group, except for Native Hawaiian/other Pacific Islander and multiracial students.
• Additional Demographics
  • Overall, 3.06% of lawyers identified as having a disability, up from 2.54% in 2024. Associates were almost twice as likely to identify as having a disability as compared to partners (3.80% vs. 2.13%).
  • The percentage of LGBTQ+ lawyers fell by 0.2 percentage points in 2025 to 4.90%. Despite this overall drop in the representation of LGBTQ+ lawyers, the proportion of LGBTQ+ associates reached a record high of 7.87%, growing by 0.1 percentage points from 2024.
  • The share of military veteran lawyers increased by nearly 0.3 percentage points to 2.20% in 2025. Representation of military veterans was lower among associates (1.78%) compared to partners (2.31%).

I will be at both the upcoming NALP and LSAC annual conferences and look forward to seeing many of you at one of those events! I would be happy to chat with you about these and other recent developments in the industry and look forward to sharing ways that LSAC’s Legal Education Consulting team can help you solve problems.