Leopard Law Firm Index Now Factors Ethnic Diversity in Law Firm Ratings
December 3, 2020
The Leopard Law Firm Index draws from nearly twenty years of innovations to provide a unique and insightful tool that allows law firms to measure their resilience and vitality as well as assist in identifying a law firm’s strengths and weaknesses.
Diversity within law firms is an important factor when choosing corporate representation but the lack of accessible data has made diversity hiring goals more difficult to accomplish. The Leopard List introduced diversity data on over 4200 law firms earlier this year and The Leopard Law Firm Index will now include diversity data in its unique ranking system.
Leopard Solutions released an initial BETA version of the ranking index in early October 2020, as a dynamic law firm rating system that is based on uncompromised, quantitative datasets that are weighted proportionately to the size of the firm. The rating system tracks profitability, viability, growth, and potential opportunity and gets updated twice a week to provide an accurate overview of how law firms are doing.
Diversity fosters many organizational advantages including increased profitability, greater creativity, problem-solving, and stronger governance. Diverse organizations are more resilient, effective, and outperform competitors that are less focused on diversity. Over the last decade, more corporations are requiring law firms to diversify partnerships and leadership roles with more women, attorneys of color, LGBTQ+, and lawyers with disabilities.
The Leopard diversity tool was created to measure law firm diversity and fuel diverse attorney recruitment. While law firms and legal recruiters recognize the need for diverse hires, there are not many benchmarking or recruitment tools on the market to move the needle towards achieving diversity goals. Accurate data is the missing link for firms, recruiters, and corporations to measure and benchmark strategic diversity growth measures, which are more important than ever.
The Leopard Law Firm Index is based on seven to eight weighted indicators of law firm sustainability and eliminates the bias for relative law firm size. These factors include:
- Ethnic diversity at the law firm
- Growth or decline in attorney headcount
- Average attorney tenure
- Insider rating and internal firm satisfaction
- Increases or decreases in revenue per lawyer (RPL) over five years
- Relative success in lateral recruiting and general retention (partner and associates)
- Relative success recruiting and retaining entry-level attorneys
- Promotions to partner
The inclusion of diversity within the Leopard Law Firm Index will provide a 360-degree overview of the health of a law firm in real-time. Law firms will now be able to understand opportunities quickly and easily for change and improvement with the ability to analyze the data aspects of the score affecting the overall health of a firm. They can use the index to help inform their strategic and business decisions, as well as use the information to dig into the component elements and flag areas that can be improved. “During turbulent times, a once-yearly ranking system is obsolete and provides firms with overconfidence during down economies and an ever-changing market,” said Laura Leopard, CEO, and Founder of Leopard Solutions. “The Leopard Law Firm Index is updated weekly in consideration of firm and market changes we are continuously assessing multiple data points including diversity for the law firms researched by our team of data experts.” The information included in the index provides leadership with real-time data to track success and/or make course corrections. For more information on The Leopard Law Firm Index and the diversity tool, contact sales@leopardsolutions to receive a free demonstration.
