New Evidence on GPA and Success In Law Firms

Can better data resolve deeply-felt issues? My entry today might be viewed as a little experiment on this question. But first, some background.

Last summer, I published The Racial Paradox of the Corporate Law Firm, a piece that explored the fate of minorities at big, elite law firms. I pointed out that while minorities are very well-represented among the starting associates at these firms, blacks and (to a somewhat lesser extent) Hispanics have far higher attrition rates than whites, leaving few black and Hispanic senior associates around when partnership decisions are made. I laid out various possible theories to explain these high attrition rates, including two different ways discrimination might affect the outcomes. And then I laid out a variety of new and fairly detailed data on the characteristics and experiences of new associates. Though I found much of the evidence consistent with more than one theory, I concluded that it was very likely that the aggressive use of racial preferences by law firms contributed to the problem. There was no doubt that firms were granting enormous preferences – in one large dataset of new associates at big firms, the median black GPA was at the 18th percentile while the median white was at the 75th percentile. Wouldn't a big disparity in grades produce a disparity in work quality? It was hard to explain many of the patterns otherwise:

--Black and Hispanic associates had experiences that closely matched those of white men on the “external indicia” of their jobs -- things like salary, hours, and representation on firm committees. But they tended to get fewer work assignments, were given less responsibility on those assignments, and were far less satisfied with the training and mentoring they received, compared with white male associates. Importantly, the problems a group had in these areas closely matched the size of their credential gap with white male associates. Blacks reported the most serious problems, and received the largest hiring preferences, then Hispanics, and then Asians. White women, who appeared to have exactly the same credentials, on average, as white men, reported virtually no differences from white men in mentoring, work assignments, or levels of responsibility -- and indeed reported very high levels of satisfaction.

--Smaller law firms appeared to be much less likely to use large racial preferences in hiring associates. I could not find any statistically significant difference in the grades of black and white associates, for example, though probably there's some disparity. Correspondingly, blacks at small firms generally are far more satisfied on issues like mentoring and work responsibility than their counterparts at big firms, and by most indicators, there's not a significant black-white gap in small-firm experiences.

Certainly, if big-firm racial preferences in hiring produce differences in performance that correlate with race, they will also produce invidious negative stereotypes in the minds of big-firm partners that could further hold back strong minority associates. But, I argue, if firms use radically different GPA thresholds for different racial groups in hiring, we ought to expect both differences in performance and negative stereotyping.

From the time I first presented this paper to a symposium at the University of North Carolina, it has evoked two types of responses. The first reaction -- always very vocally expressed -- is that my entire argument unjustifiably assumes that grades have something meaningful to do with the on-the-job performance of lawyers. The second reaction -- always expressed quietly, usually one-on-one and often from lawyers who have sat on the hiring or promotion committees of big firms -- is that my article gets it exactly right, but that any firm which publicly said so would expose itself to a lawsuit.

Public discussion of the article tends, therefore, to be a bit skewed. In November, after the New York Times ran a careful, thoughtful piece about The Racial Paradox, it ran a fluffy follow-up piece in the Week in Review, in which education reporter Jonathan Glater asked various law firm partners how important grades were for success at their firm. A typical response was 'Gee, I never would have made partner if they'd looked at my grades.'

This is disingenuous in two ways. I certainly don't contend that firms look at law school transcripts when they decide which associates to promote to partner. My point is that, other things equal, associates with high GPAs will tend to perform better, and thus will tend to build stronger reputations at the firm and succeed more often. And if this isn't true, then why would big firms set such high GPA standards in their entry-level hiring, and why would they pay such high salaries to lure the highest-GPA students?

The Racial Paradox did present some data showing that higher-GPA students tended to be more successful at big firms (e.g., Table 13), but I realized after the article was published that my presentation of the data was somewhat too abstract to really drive the point home. With further analysis, I've developed a clearer way to show the underlying patterns. The data below comes from the University of Michigan Law School's famous alumni surveys. UMLS has for many years sent out questionnaires to its alumni five and fifteen years after graduation. It links this data to actual transcript information, so that we know how each respondent performed in law school. By looking at this data, only for whites, we can accurately see the effect of grades on outcomes without the usual confounding effects of race and law school.

White Michigan Grads at Private Firms with 100+ lawyers (per 1000 graduates)

Grade Decile	Joining big firms after graduation	At big firms, 5 years out	At big firms 15 years out (gen'ly partners)	Partnership rate (per 1000 grads)
1	39	40	16	1.6%
2	80	68	15	1.5%
3	126	92	32	3.2%
4	168	130	29	2.9%
5	177	149	55	5.5%
6	190	167	86	8.6%
7	243	200	103	10.3%
8	247	219	123	12.3%
9	239	235	127	12.7%
10	221	237	169	16.9%
Number of cases	1731	1537	755
Median percentile	63	66	73

For this analysis, I grouped the white alumni from UMLS into ten equal groups based on their actual law school GPA. The table shows the rate at which these graduates (at rates per 1000 grads) worked at firms with 100 or more lawyers. Just after graduation, for example, white UMLS grads with grades in the 3rd decile had a 12.6% chance of working at a big firm (126 per 1000), while grads in the 10th (top) decile had a 22.1% chance -- a reflection, no doubt, of the easier time high-GPA grads would have getting jobs in big firms. The next two columns show how many grads were still at big firms 5 and 15 years after graduation. (I haven't tracked individual career histories for this analysis, so it is not identical to an attrition study, but it is very similar to one.) There is some erosion in numbers by the 5th year, and much more erosion between the 5th and 15th year (by which time partnership decisions have been made). And the rates of erosion are very highly correlated with GPA. Thus, for every 126 grads in the 3rd decile who are big firms in Year 1, there are 32 by year 15 (one-fourth as many). In the top grade decile, the Year 15 numbers are still about three-quarters as large as the Year 1 numbers. Indeed, in this population, there is nearly as much sorting by GPA after the initial hiring process as there is during the initial hiring process.

In other words, this data shows clearly that GPA matters a lot to one's success and longevity in the world of big firms. And, since this data is just for whites, we know that discrimination is not playing a role in these outcomes (unless, as seems unlikely, firms do pay attention to transcripts after hiring).

Moreover, if we think about this data carefully, we'll see that low GPAs will probably have even more harmful effects when they arise from racial preferences. In the table above, I can't distinguish between different sorts of big firms. But it is likely that the high-GPA whites are at tougher, more competitive firms (on average) than are the low-GPA whites. Their success rates are swimming upstream against more competitive environments and lower partnership rates. Naturally, low-GPA whites have both a better chance of being hired, and of succeeding, at a firm which is big but not super-elite. If we could control for firm quality, the GPA disparities in outcomes in the chart would probably be much greater.

For racial minorities, this caveat does not apply. The most elite firms are the ones most aggressive in using racial preferences, so huge grade disparities divide races within the same firm. So just how, exactly, can one argue that "grades don't matter" in the face of this data?

Comments

[J]

I am not surprised by the study. I think it demonstrates motivation and perhaps a minor facet of intelligence, e.g. the ability to understand what pleases your superiors by understanding what they want, not necessarily what is critical or incisive. I am attorney, who doesn't even practice, and some of my friends from law school, who were on law review and moot court are otherwise no more advanced than anyone else. Hell, some are raving alcoholics.

The GPA and the IQ are absurd at best. They represent everything that is wrong with postmodernist society, they try to quantify everything. By modern standards, Edison and Einstein would probably be considered morons b/c they didn't do well in school (whatever that means). I think GPA only means one takes orders well, which makes them a perfect fit in the dull, shallow, soul-crushing realm of corporate America. It demonstrates that your humanity has been destroyed and that you have accepted your fate as a cog in the proverbial machine and that you are comfortable with the complacency of the bourgeois establishment. I think it is inversely proportional to your sense of individuality. Maybe they should invent an IGPA (individuality grade point average) or a CQ (creativity quotient) or better yet, dispense of all of them.

I also think GPA and IQ are often correlated to class b/c if one has to help put bread on the table while in high school or college, they have less time to study which often leads to lower grades. Which leads me to the conclusion that if you are affluent and not truly mentally challenged and you can't get into an "elite" institution, you are either a complete asshole or a true genius because you might have some scintilla of individuality left in you.

[Mark]

Richard: You seem to be on a mission with this theory, but I find it disappointing that in your study you dismiss the significance of six times as many blacks as whites complaining about being subjected to demeaning comments and other forms of harassment. This strikes me as irresponsible and unprofessional. How is it that you can rule this out as not the principal reason for black attrition from law firms?

Also, I noted that your conterarguments to the racism explanation were very thin:

Regarding your observation that Hispanics are discriminated against more in society at large, but aren't complaining in the law firms is a non sequitur. A lot of Hispanics in America are illegal, so that's why they are being discrimninated against. Blacks do not have this problem. The Hispanics at law firms presumably filled out W-2s and are not illegals. The way whites treat them in the law firm environment has nothing to do with the studies of the discrimination they face in America at large.

Your question about why firms hire minorities if they're just going to discriminate against them when they get there, assumes taht the firms have a consistent policy on minorities, when they don't. The people that do the interviewing are not the same people that the minorities end up complaining about once the work gets started.

Finally, I don't understand why your data does not take into account the possibility of grade trends. You note that the firms' ultimate goal is to find people that can do the work. Might they have determined that one thing they can look for is whether students are developing skills in law school that might show up by improving? You wouldn't see that in a study of cumulative GPA. There is a striking intersection between race and class struggles in America, and it's likely that disadvantaged black students might be slow starters. There are probably ten times as many white children of lawyers in law school than black children of lawyers, who have already learned to think like lawyers. Also children of business people, doctors, etc., wealthy people who might have encouraged their children to take the summer off before law school and study in advance. Finally, did you take into account the programs where students have the option of working, which takes time away from studies, and yet had to? I can't prove that more blacks than whites are in that situation per capita, but you could have at least looked into it and dropped it in a footnote. You're advancing quite the politicaly incorrect theory here, I'd think you'd want to be watertight about it.

Firms don't just hand out offers, it's a question of good business, so I would think that they are looking for some kind of evidence that the person can do the work. Grade trends are one way they might find a bright African American employee.

Finally, I don't understand why you use data from the Bar Passage Study that incorporates whether the student passed the bar or not. That's a temporal flaw. The firm isn't handing out large and aggressive racial preferences based on something about the student that they don't know, such as whether they passed the bar or not. They wouldn't have even taken the bar yet. Please revise the study to take this into account. I don't know whether the 1% to 7-8% ratio of top black students to black associates hired at law firms would become less inflammatory if you did.

The current blog uses your North Carolina article as the touchstone, so I won't comment on it at this time. Regards,

[Mark]

Richard: You seem to be on a mission with this theory, but I find it disappointing that in your study you dismiss the significance of six times as many blacks as whites complaining about being subjected to demeaning comments and other forms of harassment. This strikes me as irresponsible and unprofessional. How is it that you can rule this out as not the principal reason for black attrition from law firms?

Also, I noted that your conterarguments to the racism explanation were very thin:

Regarding your observation that Hispanics are discriminated against more in society at large, but aren't complaining in the law firms in a non sequitur. A lot of Hispanics in America are illegal, so that's why they are being discrimninated against. Blacks do not have this problem. The Hispanics at law firms presumably filled out W-2s and are not illegals. The way whites treat them in the law firm environment has nothing to do with the studies of the discrimination they face in America at large.

Your question about why firms minorities if they're just going to discriminate against them when they get there, assumes taht the firms have a consistent policy on minorities, when they don't. The people that do the interviewing are not the same people that the minorities end up complaining about once the work gets started.

Finally, I don't understand why your data does not take into account the possibility of grade trends. You note that the firms' ultimate goal is to find people that can do the work. Might they have determined that one thing they can look for is whether students are developing skills in law school that might show up by improving? You wouldn't see that in a study of cumulative GPA. There is a striking intersection between race and class struggles in America, and it's likely that disadvantaged black students might be slow starters. There are probably ten times as many white children of lawyers in law school than black children of lawyers, who have already learned to think like lawyers. Also children of businss people, doctors, etc., wealthy people who might have encouraged their children to take the summer off before law school and study in advance. Finally, did you take into account the programs where students have the option of working, which takes time away from studies, and yet had to? I can't prove that more blacks than whites are in that situation per capita, but you could have at least looked into it and dropped it in a footnote. You're advancing quite the politicaly incorrect theory here, I'd think you'd want to be watertight about it.

Firms don't just hand out offers, it's a question of good business, so I would think that they are looking for some kind of evidence that the person can do the work. Grade trends are one way they might find a bright African American employee.

Finally, I don't understand why you use data from the Bar Passage Study that incorporates whether the student passed the bar or ot. THat's a temporal flaw. The firm isn't handing out large and aggressive racial preferences based on something about the student that they don't know, such as whether they passed the bar or not. They wouldn't have even taken the bar yet. Please revise the study to take this into account. I don't know whether the 1% to 7-8% ratio of top black students to black associates hired at law firms would become less inflammatory if you did.

The current blog uses your North Carolina article as the touchstone, so I won't comment on it at this time. Regards,

[sum the column]

joe and - wouldn't you sum the final column and find 75% of grads in paternship positions?

[Atticus Falcon]

Lawyers are supposed to be able to compartmentalize. My impression was that the initial discussion about minorities at law firms was meant only to serve as background to the "why" of the posting re. GPAs of WHITE careers at law firms. It would be nice if postings would stay focused on the latter, as the latter was what the posting was really about, yes? Perhaps the original paper from last year could be the subject of a separate thread, yes? Interesting as the discussion re. minorities is, I for one would rather see this GPA thread stay on-topic with regard to its stated subject.

[Joe]

I did not read your study, but based on your blog entry, I find quite a bit of generalizations on your analysis of your findings. Also it appears that all other factors or variables were not taken into considerations. It appears that with a set of data, the researcher jumped off to make quick conclusions that will draw attention to the publication.

Before concluding that members of minority groups do not do well in large law firms based on GPA, did the researcher consider other factors such as the culture of the organizations, acceptance and perception of members of the minority groups, issues of discrimination, or racism? In a culture where racism is still prevalent, what impact does it have on minorities in a work place? Outside large law firms there have been series of law suites on discrimination and racism, could that be a factor in large law firms? Similarly, the glass ceiling exists not only for women but also for members of the minority groups, could that be a factor in large law firms?

When the decisions were made for partners in large law firms, were Blacks and Hispanics represented in the decision-making body? Who makes the decisions?

If GPA’s are predictors of success in large law firms, did it affect whites with low GPA’s? How about members of other ethnic groups?

It seems like a big leap from the data to conclude that "GPA matters a lot to one's success and longevity in the world of big firms" That leads to the assumption that members of the identified minority groups will not succeed in large farms.

Why base their performance or success on GPA if in the large firms members of the minority groups were given “fewer work assignments, were given less responsibility on those assignments, and were far less satisfied with the training and mentoring they received, compared with white male associates.” Does this not seem like setting up for failure? It does not seem like a level playing field and does not seem to have anything to do with GPA. Why compare black and white performance if they did not get the same treatment?

If “Correspondingly, blacks at small firms generally are far more satisfied on issues like mentoring and work responsibility than their counterparts at big firms, and by most indicators, there's not a significant black-white gap in small-firm experiences,” does that mean that minority GPA’s work better in small firms, but not in large firms? Is GPA the factor or are there other predictors?

What about minority candidates with higher GPS’s? How did they fare in large firms? How did whites with low GPA’s fare in large firms?

[Richard Sander]

I appreciate the many comments, and will post a reply after running some more numbers.

[Patrick]

I have to agree with anon. What matters is the partnership rate of those in a particular decile who were hired by big firms in the first place, not the entire pool. That's the only way to hold all else equal for determining the effect of GPA on partnership chances (after all, if you're never hired by a big firm, you can't easily make partner at one). To use the entire pool effectively makes the firms' refusal to hire low-GPA students as a rule into a self-fulfilling prophecy. A useful column to have would be the number of lawyers in a decile who are employed by a big firm at any point in the first 15 years. Failing that, those who are hired out of law school seems a decent proxy.

It seems to me that what you ought to do is to compare the ratio of the number in the 15 year out column to the number of first year hires, for each decile, for each ethnicity. If those numbers are reasonably close for each group, then it seems to me that you have shown that it is likely that GPA disparities account for racial differences in partnership make-up. If not, you've got some more 'splainin' to do.

[More data please]

So white associates have between a 25%-60% chance of making partner, depending on their GPA. What are the corresponding percentages for minority associates? 1-2%?

[anon]

Dear author,

Comparing the bottom 5 GPAs with the top 5. 147/590 in the bottom 5 GPA groups made partner - a 25% partnership rate. The top 5 GPA groups have a 608/1140 or 53% partnership rate.
Compare any other two GPA groups and you get similar results. For example the top 3 GPA groups have a 60% partnership rate, and the bottom 3 have a 26% partnership rate.

Thus your grade analysis, despite its intentionally distorted presentation, falls far short of explaining the paucity of minority partners at top firms.

[patrick]

So after careful review, I was wrong. It looks like it's all in terms of per 1000 grads, which makes the title on the last column a little strange.

[Chicago]

Isn't it a bit too strong to say that "GPA matters a lot to one's success and longevity in the world of big firms"? Isn't it more likely that the same attributes that allow students to achieve a high GPA are also important in being successful at a large law firm?

[Chicago]

Isn't it a bit too strong to say that "GPA matters a lot to one's success and longevity in the world of big firms"? Isn't it more likely that the same attributes that allow students to achieve a high GPA are also important in being successful at a large law firm?

[mike]

"At my law school (Cornell), the number of men and women on law review (grade based) seemed roughly equivalent, and I'd imagine it's the same at most other law schools. So how do you explain the "glass ceiling" phenomenon at firms, where far more men than women attain partnership when their grades are presumably equivalent?"

Women get pregnant.

[Carolyn Elefant]

At my law school (Cornell), the number of men and women on law review (grade based) seemed roughly equivalent, and I'd imagine it's the same at most other law schools. So how do you explain the "glass ceiling" phenomenon at firms, where far more men than women attain partnership when their grades are presumably equivalent?

[Captain Obvious]

"they tended to get fewer work assignments, were given less responsibility on those assignments"

What does this have to do with law school GPA?

[patrick]

Daniel-

I got that mixed up at first too. For the top decile we know that 221 went to a big firm, but we don't know how many students are at MLS in the sample period (or at least I don't). If there were, say, 10000, then the top decile would be 1000 and so about 20% would be going to big firms. But if there were, say, 4000, then the top decile would be 400 and over half of them are going to big firms.

P

[Daniel]

I don't get this. Your table seems to suggest that about 20% of the Michgian's top half works at a big law firm.

That seems way off. Probably more than 70% is a more accurate number.