By Tracy Jan, The Washington Post

Minority lawyers now make up 16 percent of law firms -- a record high -- but remain scarce at the top, where only 9 percent of law partners are people of color, according to new data collected by the Minority Corporate Counsel Association.

Put another way, nearly half of their white counterparts make partner, while the vast majority of minorities remain associates.

The disparity is also reflected in the corporate world, where only 11 percent of general counsels at Fortune 500 companies are black, Hispanic, Asian or Native American even though minorities make up a third of the legal profession as a whole.

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By: Daniella Isaacson, Esq., Senior Analyst, ALM Intelligence 

Succession planning, the final and arguably most important piece in the employee lifecycle, is integral to the long-term success of any enterprise. Businesses are not immortal; their continued existence, once created, is far from guaranteed. In the current age of innovation and disruption, planning for the future in the present is more critical than ever.

This holds true particularly for the legal sector, an industry where individuals, in the form of equity partners, have outsized impacts on the fortunes of their firms. To ensure their organizations’ future, firm leaders must face of a governance structure that traditionally incentivizes short-term profit maximization for individuals at the expense of long-term strategic planning and stability for the firm. Consequently, failure to plan the stewardship of the business and its passing to the next generation puts the future of the firm at great risk.

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By: Debra Cassens Weiss, ABA Law Journal

Keith Wetmore, former chair and chief executive partner of Morrison & Foerster, is leaving the law firm at the end of the year to join Major, Lindsey & Africa’s San Francisco office as a managing director.

Wetmore tells Bloomberg Big Law Business that legal recruiting “has actually been something of an escape fantasy for me for years.”

“I love talking to people about their careers and I love helping partners succeed,” Wetmore tells Bloomberg.

Wetmore was chairman of Morrison & Foerster for 12 years beginning in 2000, and has served as chairman emeritus since then. He was one of the first openly gay men to lead a large law firm, the Recorder (sub. req.) reports. A press release is here.

Wetmore will be joining another BigLaw recruit in the San Francisco office—Richard Hsu, formerly an intellectual property practice leader at Shearman & Sterling. Hsu joined Major, Lindsey & Africa in May.

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By: Jeff Kauflin , FORBES 

For anyone contemplating a career as an attorney, researching law schools is a critical part of the process. And to help with the search, the Princeton Review released its annual list of the best law schools for career prospects. It used several factors to create the ranking, including graduates’ median starting salaries, schools’ employment outcomes and the number of students who pass the bar on their first try. It also incorporated student survey responses, such as how prepared they felt upon graduation. The Princeton Review polled 19,900 students at 169 law schools for the list. Full methodology details are available here.

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By : Stephanie Ward, ABA Journal

After recent announcements from various law schools that they will accept the GRE from applicants in addition to the LSAT, an American Bar Association section committee recently made various accreditation standard recommendations (PDF), including doing away with the separate admissions test rule entirely.

In March, the council of the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar sought notice and comment for a proposed revision to Standard 503—which covers admission tests—that called for the council to establish a process that determines the reliability and validity of other tests besides the LSAT. That’s a change from the current version, which directs law schools using alternate admissions tests to demonstrate that the exams are valid and reliable.

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Follow Us

By:  Katelyn Polantz, The National Law Journal

Sean Marotta put on Twitter an open offer to have coffee, thinking that one or two young lawyers in Washington, D.C., might have interest in meeting him, a seventh-year associate in Hogan Lovells’ appellate practice.

But then the requests multiplied. Marotta, whose Twitter presence is among those central to the #AppellateTwitter online community, ultimately met with 15 summer associates this year from a variety of law programs in the nation’s capital. He would greet them in Hogan Lovells’ concourse, walk them over to a nearby Starbucks and then talk for an hour.

After two separate summer legal interns with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission requested coffees, he upgraded their chat to Shake Shack. After each meeting, the summers posed for selfies with Marotta to prove to their tweeps the power of online connections

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The American Lawyer

By: Chris Johnson

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is set to launch a law firm in the U.S., a clear sign that the concerted push into legal services by the Big Four accounting firms continues.

PwC to Launch US Law Firm

By: Michelle Kim Hall, Contributor, U.S. News & World Report 

With the new law school application cycle underway, prospective law school students may wonder what admissions committees are looking for from applicants this year. Fortunately, recent data can help applicants gauge what to expect. Here are our predictions for law school application trends in the 2017-2018 submissions cycle.

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