Despite a lot of talk, law firms continue to make little progress down on the diversity path. Law firms set billing rates of ethnically and gender diverse lawyers, particularly at more experienced levels, lower than white males.
Kris Satkunis, Director of Strategic Counseling of LexisNexis’ CounselLink had a problem. She was tasked with giving a webinar on benchmarks for diversity and equality in law firms and was looking for a new way to go at the issue.
Satkunis had an idea. She reasoned that while pundits often talk people numbers: how many women, how many diverse lawyers, how many this, how many that. No one looked hard at the money. Remember the adage: “follow the money”? Satkunis had the bright idea to follow the money: analyze the billing rates lawyer charge their clients. She reasoned that billing rates are the critical factor in driving lawyer compensation (and power in law firms). As she puts it, billing rates are “a proxy for a lawyer’s value to the firm.” And she had a pool of data to look at how the rates of diverse lawyers and women compare to those of white males.
LexisNexis’ CounselLink requires lawyers that bill through the program provide data on ethnicity and gender. Satkunis was able to marry this data with billing rates reflected on invoices run through the ConselLink program. CounselLink is used by in-house legal departments of many large corporations to monitor and analyze legal fees.
Using CounselLink data, Satkunis analyzed some 20,000 attorney profiles in CounselLink and the data with the attorneys’ hourly billing rates on invoices billed between January 2020 and September 2021. Satkunis and CounselLink released the analysis on November 17.
In a sentence, the results ain’t pretty. At lower billing rates-those of younger attorneys-
