Darren Teshima of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe is one of several hundred 2015 Fellows who met in New Orleans to kick off their fellowship year. (Photo by Wilma Jackson).

Noting that 2015 marked the first time the Big Easy has hosted a national LCLD Fellows event, the city's premier business publication, New Orleans City Business, reported on diversity challenges facing the legal profession and progress being made by the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity.

The 2015 Fellows meeting, held March 6-8, was attended by 204 Fellows, chosen by law firm and corporate members of LCLD.

City Business reported that persons of color “represented just more than 6% of leadership at the top 200 law firms as of two years ago, up from 2.5% in 1993,” and that “efforts to diversify the industry are starting to have an impact.”

Over the past five years, City Business reports, the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity “has been recruiting and providing training and mentorship opportunities for high-potential, mid-career attorneys in an effort to diversify the profession and improve historically low statistics.”

The publication reported LCLD Program Director Lori Lorenzo’s view that LCLD gives Fellows valuable exposure to the leaders in the profession: corporate general counsel and law firm managing partners.

“We think that giving the Fellows an opportunity to interact with top leadership gives them better direction and understanding of how to ultimately become general counsel or managing partners themselves,” said Lorenzo.

She also noted that women have always been under-represented in top leadership positions with law firms, attributing that fact to “…a lack of understanding in the profession on how to provide flexible schedule arrangements and alternative work schedules so that there can be a better life/work balance.”

“We are beginning to see a change in this respect among some of the larger law firms,” Lorenzo said, “but it’s a slow moving evolution.”