The American Bar Association recently released its 2024 Profile of the Legal Profession, and women were at the forefront.
For several years running, women have outnumbered men in law schools, and this year was no different. Around 56% of law students are women, and the ABA noted the gap is growing every year. On the faculty side, the representation of women is growing as well. The ABA predicts that starting this year or next year, women will make up the majority of full-time faculty in ABA-accredited law schools.
In law firms, women outnumbered men for the first time at the associate level in 2023, according to the National Association for Law Placement. Representation is still uneven at the partner level, with women making up 28% of law firm partners in 2023. That is still up from just over a decade ago, when women made up 20% of law firm partnerships.
The report noted that men still dominate, numbers-wise, in federal judgeships, state supreme courts and corporate counsel positions. But as more women than men enter the profession, that’s likely to shift.
Another sector where women have taken over the majority is in the executive branch of the federal government. Of the 44,000 general attorneys employed by the government, 51.5% were women, as of December 2023.
Overall, women now make up 41% of the profession, up from 36% just a decade ago. The state with the highest percentage of women is Georgia, with men and women at a 50/50 split. Colorado sits right at the national average, with women making up 41% of attorneys in the centennial state.
Broader Demographic Trends
If four lawyers were randomly selected from the general national pool, it’s more than likely that one of those lawyers would be in California or New York. Combined, the two states have more than 350,000 lawyers, or 28% of the country’s lawyer population.
Colorado boasts just a fraction of both of the states, with 23,249 resident lawyers in 2024. On the per capita front, Colorado does fare well when compared with the rest of the country. Colorado ranks 11th on lawyers per capita, with nearly 4 lawyers for every 1,000 residents.
The profession is steadily becoming more diverse as well. The percentage of Asian American and Hispanic lawyers is growing, but the percentage of Hispanic lawyers, at 6%, is more than 10% lower than their share of the general population. The percentage of Black lawyers remained unchanged at 5%, nearly 9% lower than their share of the general population.
Partnership has become more diverse as well, with people of color making up 12% of partners in 2023, up from 6% in 2009. The trend line has also gotten steeper. According to the ABA report, the increase in partners of color was below 0.3% every year. Since 2016, it’s increased at least 1% every two years.
Associates are more diverse than ever, with 30% of associates lawyers of color in 2023, a nearly 10% increase over the past decade.
More lawyers are now identifying as LGBTQ+. Across all lawyers at law firms, 4.6% identify as LGBTQ+, more than double the number that did just a decade ago. The number is higher for both law firm associates and summer associates. 6.8% of associates identify as LGBTQ+, and 11.7% of summer associates surveyed said they were LGBTQ+.
Colorado’s Lucrative Locations
The work lawyers put in during their extra years of schooling is still paying off on average. The profession ranked 28th in average wages across the country in 2023, with an average wage of $176,000.
Those wages can vary greatly depending on location, but there are two locales in Colorado where it really pays to be an attorney. Of the top 10 metropolitan areas with the highest average wages for lawyers, Boulder sits in third, above San Francisco, and Fort Collins comes in just above New York City at eighth.
While the average wage is high, the report noted that there were significant variations in salary depending on career path.
Law firms, on average, pay more than the across-the-board average, even for associates straight out of college. The median associate salary in 2023 was $200,000, rising up to more than $300,000 for an eighth-year associate.
On the flip side, public defenders and lawyers in civil legal services or public interest organizations had a median entry-level salary lower than $70,000. With experience, the median salary grows, but the highest median salary for a lawyer with 15 years of experience at a public interest organization is still nearly $80,000 lower than the median salary for a first-year associate.
The Future of the Profession
Enrollment for a traditional J.D. remained about the same as the past few years, with nearly 117,000 students at ABA-accredited law schools. But there has been significant growth in another area: non-J.D. programs in law schools. More than 23,000 students are working on masters of law or similar degrees, as well as certificates, across U.S. law schools — nearly double the students that were pursuing them just a decade ago.
Upon graduation, lawyers are increasingly more likely to find a job after graduation, with unemployment among new graduates the lowest it has been in at least a decade.
But where law students are going upon graduation is shifting, according to the report. More than half of students graduating law school are now joining law firms, a 14% increase from just a decade ago.
The amount of students moving into government work and judicial clerkships has remained steady, at 11% and 10%, respectively.
But there have been significant recent drops in two areas: the business sector and solo work. The percentage of law students entering the business sector following graduation has dropped from 15% for the class of 2014 to 8% for the class of 2023. The amount of students pursuing solo work after graduation has also dropped significantly, from 2.3% for the class 2013 to 0.6% for the class of 2023.