For our first episode of Season Four, Partner April Isaacson is joined by Jordana Goodman and returning guests, Paul Gugliuzza and Rachel Rebouché. The trio discuss their groundbreaking article, “Inequality on Appeal: The Intersection of Race and Gender in Patent Litigation,” which showcases the on-going racial and gender disparities in the legal profession, particularly in the high-stakes world of appellate patent litigation.
The professors present the findings from their hand-coded, first-of-its-kind dataset, revealing that despite increasing diversity among law students and lawyers, a lack of diversity persists at the legal profession’s highest levels. Of the 6,000-plus oral arguments presented to the Federal Circuit in patent cases from 2010 through 2019, 93% were delivered by white attorneys, with white male attorneys alone arguing 82% of patent cases. In contrast, women of color argued fewer than 2% of cases.
Interestingly, the disparities found bear no correlation to attorney performance.
Jordana, Paul, and Rachel identify areas of patent practice where women, people of color, and women of color are more visible—most notably, in representing the federal government in patent appeals—and examine the reasons that there is not the same level of disparity as in private practice. They explore potential solutions to address these inequities, such as mentorship and sponsorship, particularly for junior associates, and the need for law firms to establish standards for promotion and professional development. They also discuss the role of programs that aim to increase diversity and the need for these initiatives to be data-backed and effective.
This episode provides a compelling call to action for the legal profession to address the systemic issues causing racial and gender disparities. The professors urge law firms to make data-backed efforts to improve diversity and inclusion, emphasizing that the problem is not specific to patent law but is a broader issue in the legal profession and the corporate world in general.
Resources:
Thanks for listening to Sidebars! Connect with us:
**The opinions expressed are those of the attorneys and do not necessarily reflect the views of the firm or its clients. This podcast is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.
For our first episode of Season Four, Partner April Isaacson is joined by Jordana Goodman and returning guests, Paul Gugliuzza and Rachel Rebouché. The trio discuss their groundbreaking article, “Inequality on Appeal: The Intersection of Race and Gender in Patent Litigation,” which showcases the on-going racial and gender disparities in the legal profession, particularly in the high-stakes world of appellate patent litigation.
The professors present the findings from their hand-coded, first-of-its-kind dataset, revealing that despite increasing diversity among law students and lawyers, a lack of diversity persists at the legal profession’s highest levels. Of the 6,000-plus oral arguments presented to the Federal Circuit in patent cases from 2010 through 2019, 93% were delivered by white attorneys, with white male attorneys alone arguing 82% of patent cases. In contrast, women of color argued fewer than 2% of cases.
Interestingly, the disparities found bear no correlation to attorney performance.
Jordana, Paul, and Rachel identify areas of patent practice where women, people of color, and women of color are more visible—most notably, in representing the federal government in patent appeals—and examine the reasons that there is not the same level of disparity as in private practice. They explore potential solutions to address these inequities, such as mentorship and sponsorship, particularly for junior associates, and the need for law firms to establish standards for promotion and professional development. They also discuss the role of programs that aim to increase diversity and the need for these initiatives to be data-backed and effective.
This episode provides a compelling call to action for the legal profession to address the systemic issues causing racial and gender disparities. The professors urge law firms to make data-backed efforts to improve diversity and inclusion, emphasizing that the problem is not specific to patent law but is a broader issue in the legal profession and the corporate world in general.
Resources:
Thanks for listening to Sidebars! Connect with us:
**The opinions expressed are those of the attorneys and do not necessarily reflect the views of the firm or its clients. This podcast is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.
00:00:00:22 - 00:00:26:27
April Isaacson
Welcome back to Sidebars, Kilpatrick's limited-release podcast focused on women and diversity in the law. I'm April Isaacson, and today I'm joined by guests Jordana Goodman, Assistant Professor of Law at Chicago Kent School of Law, Paul Gugliuzza, Professor of Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law, and Rachel Rebouché, Dean and Professor of Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law.
00:00:27:00 - 00:00:50:12
April Isaacson
As you might recall from Season Two, Paul and Rachel joined us before to talk about their excellent piece, “Gender Inequality in Patent Litigation.” And we're excited to have them along with Jordi today, as she says, it's fine for me to call her, to talk about their excellent piece, “Inequality on Appeal: The Intersection of Race and Gender in Patent Litigation.”
00:00:50:14 - 00:00:53:06
April Isaacson
Welcome all of you to Sidebars.
00:00:53:08 - 00:00:53:23
Jordana Goodman
Thank you so much.
00:00:53:24 - 00:00:55:00
Rachel Rebouché
Thank you.
00:00:55:03 - 00:01:06:25
April Isaacson
So there's so much data in here. And as we like to say, the numbers don't lie. So maybe we can start off with what was the inspiration for you deciding that you wanted to write this piece?
00:01:06:27 - 00:01:46:06
Paul Gugliuzza
Well, you know, as you mentioned, Rachel and I had had worked on a piece a couple of years ago just looking at the gender breakdown among Federal Circuit patent lawyers. We found, maybe not surprisingly, that the lawyers arguing Federal Circuit patent appeals were primarily men, almost 90% men. And that was an interesting story. We dug a little bit deeper and found some, you know, some intriguing differences, particularly when you compared lawyers arguing on behalf of private sector clients to lawyers argue on behalf of the government.
00:01:46:08 - 00:02:10:07
Paul Gugliuzza
Although there was a vast gender disparity in the data set among private sector lawyers, that disparity almost disappeared among government lawyers, it was almost 50/50 gender breakdown there. So that was really interesting to us. But we recognized that by looking at gender, we were only looking at one dimension of diversity. And as we know, you know, identities intersect
00:02:10:07 - 00:02:36:18
Paul Gugliuzza
and the way racial identities intersect with gender identities can affect the way in which someone interacts with the legal system, the roles they play as lawyers, particularly in the patent system. And so what we wanted to do is take our existing data set that we'd already coded for the gender of lawyers and add some data about race. That was complicated, it’s a pretty big dataset,
00:02:36:18 - 00:03:10:28
Paul Gugliuzza
it covers about a ten year period of Federal Circuit patent appeals stemming from 2010 to 2019. So there's over 2,500 individual lawyers in the dataset. And so to create some data about race and see how it interacts with lawyers, gender, we had to code each individual lawyer in our dataset for race. And I think a big contribution to this project is figuring out ways in which to develop datasets that look at multiple different identities in combination.
00:03:10:28 - 00:03:11:23
Paul Gugliuzza
That's what we've done here.
00:03:11:26 - 00:03:40:05
Jordana Goodman
Yeah, and I was particularly interested in looking at the intersection of race and gender. I had done a piece earlier that was discussing representation in STEM in both university settings and elsewhere, and I was really interested in looking at perceived race because I think that that's where a lot of the sources of racism, of bias occur is how you are perceived, not how you identify.
00:03:40:07 - 00:04:03:15
Jordana Goodman
And so I was really grateful that, you know, Rachel and Paul were able to join me in this endeavor to code a new dataset for both gender and race and look at representation as well as win rates to determine where we were seeing that bias. Was it that they weren't there or was it that they also weren't winning?
00:04:03:16 - 00:04:21:10
April Isaacson
Well, one of the things I liked is that there's the, you said absence matters in your piece. And then it kind of dovetails into talking about why the profession excludes as opposed to talking about diversity, equity and inclusion. Can one of you maybe address why you decided to look at it from that prism?
00:04:21:14 - 00:05:08:14
Rachel Rebouché
You know, I think that we were interested in not just explaining the problem of a lack of representation for particularly women of color in patent litigation. But we also wanted to join a conversation about why that continues to be the case in 2024 and and beyond. And too often, I think we reduce the explanation to a set of solutions that in some ways amount to add diverse people and stir or, you know, enact a program or conduct a training and change a culture.
00:05:08:16 - 00:05:51:24
Rachel Rebouché
And those are important solutions, and they have borne fruit. But we were also interested in engaging with the systemic, deeper problems that have defined not just patent appellate litigation, but law generally, and suggested that, you know, this is the status quo and it's the status quo by design. We're pointing out a pretty stark example, but it's not going to change by, without recognizing that the world in which lawyers operate and practice law is one that is not hospitable by design to people of color, to women, to women of color.
00:05:51:27 - 00:06:02:24
Rachel Rebouché
So we are we are interested in being part of scholarship that thinks about issues of representation and diversity from that systemic point of view.
00:06:02:27 - 00:06:19:00
Paul Gugliuzza
Yeah, and speaking as someone who, you know, is a patent lawyer, studies you know, studies and teaches patent law, also wanted to sort of highlight or at least make the case that patent law is not special, right? In the sense that, you know, we'll get I'm sure we'll get into some of the more specific findings in a bit.
00:06:19:03 - 00:06:38:05
Paul Gugliuzza
But we really wanted to show is that, you know, yes, there are racial inequalities in the patent system. Yes, there are gender inequalities in the patent system. And these look a lot like the inequalities we see in all other areas of the law and in the corporate world more generally in the United States. And so the problem is not patent specific.
00:06:38:12 - 00:07:05:26
Paul Gugliuzza
And it also highlights, as Rachel was suggesting, the solutions aren't necessarily going to be patent specific either. They're going to get it's deeper structural and economic considerations. There really don't have anything to do with like patent law or the nature of patent practice, but really about sort of the way in which we structure law firms, compensation, all these really big questions that don't necessarily have anything to do with patent law.
00:07:05:29 - 00:07:25:12
April Isaacson
Well, one of the things I know that we talked about a little bit last time when you were Rachel and Paul, when you were here for Season Two and then when you reached out to me, Paul, about your latest piece that the three of you had written. I talked about that I had just argued at the Federal Circuit back in June and—won by the way—
00:07:25:15 - 00:07:54:09
April Isaacson
But but it was interesting on many levels. So first of all, I there was someone who was retiring, was going to be retired when the argument was going to be heard, who was a over six foot tall white man with gray hair, who was planning on doing it and didn't really pitch to the client anybody else to do it in any meaningful way, because I think he wanted to do it.
00:07:54:09 - 00:08:16:15
April Isaacson
And I had to have a woman advocate very strongly on my behalf with the client, who was not like a big company with like a huge legal group, right? And to them, this is sort of even though it was an IPR appeal where we had won, this is a really important big deal for them. And so that was one thing and that was very hurtful and hard for me.
00:08:16:15 - 00:08:39:23
April Isaacson
I just going to be completely honest because, you know, I've been a lawyer for more than 28 going on 29 years. I've been practicing patent law for 25 years and the fact that I'm still dealing with this at this point in my career is really hard. But then there was a really lovely note that it was two women arguing against each other and the camaraderie that we had with one another that I don't think that men would have had.
00:08:39:23 - 00:08:44:06
April Isaacson
So I know I kind of threw a lot out there, but I'd love to get your thoughts on it, the three of you.
00:08:44:08 - 00:09:16:13
Jordana Goodman
Yeah. I mean, I think there is a lot of pain that goes on when you don't see somebody who looks like you. And there's a lot of warmth when you see that your supervisor has experienced the same things you are and is trying to make your life a bit easier. I think when we are looking at the difference between government representation and private representation, that's certainly something that I suspect is behind the difference in representation.
00:09:16:15 - 00:09:38:10
Jordana Goodman
I think the reason why we're doing this also is because we're professors, we're putting our students out into the world and we're not going to lie to them about what the state of the world is. But we wanted to look and see why is this an underrepresentation? Why are some of our students not going to argue at the rates of their peers?
00:09:38:12 - 00:10:04:25
Jordana Goodman
Is it because somebody isn't choosing them? Is it because there's racist judges and you're not going to get the same outcomes? And I think the story that we tell in this paper is sad in terms of the representation differences, but really hopeful in terms of anyone who was trying to hold back and say, “we're not going to put you there because we don't think you can win,
00:10:04:27 - 00:10:31:16
Jordana Goodman
and especially because we don't think you can win against a white man.” And we're finding that that's not the story that we would tell. And so that's really heartening for me, that I can tell my students, you can fight for your right to argue, because anyone who's telling you that you're not going to win is not judging you in accordance with the data that we've we've collected.
00:10:31:19 - 00:10:45:29
April Isaacson
Yeah, maybe we can talk about that a little bit more, because I thought that was extremely fascinating is that the win rates and once you dug into it, it showed that there was no meaningful difference other than this sort of elite group of, you know, a small section of people that we can talk about a little bit more.
00:10:46:05 - 00:10:53:25
April Isaacson
Were you surprised by that at all, or was it just sort of something you thought, “well, I hope it's that way” kind of secretly in the back of your head? And
00:10:53:28 - 00:11:34:17
Paul Gugliuzza
yeah, I'll jump in with a little provide a little bit of context. So you're absolutely right. As April's question suggests, in terms of just, you know, who's arguing patent cases at the Federal Circuit, it's overwhelmingly men. It's overwhelmingly white people. And it's, you know, combining our race and gender data, it's overwhelming overwhelmingly white men. Right? So it's over over 80% of the arguments over the ten year period that we studied were represented by white men, you know, smaller fractions of white women and men of color and a particularly small fraction of women of color was around 1%.
00:11:34:19 - 00:12:08:29
Paul Gugliuzza
So you see this vast disparities in grip in representation both along race and gender lines and race and gender combined. Then we looked at, well, how do these lawyers fare on appeal? Do they win? Do they lose? We did some, you know, slicing and dicing, depending on whether a party was an appellee, an appellant, and we were able to code pretty much, you know, the vast majority of cases in our dataset for who won. And compare that to the race of the lawyer, the gender of the lawyer, the combination of race and gender.
00:12:09:01 - 00:12:38:12
Paul Gugliuzza
And the short answer is there's basically no meaningful differences whatsoever. White men, women of color, white women, men of color, however you slice it, however you dice it, whether they're representing appellees or appellants—there's practically no difference in win rates. Appellants win about a quarter of the time. Appellees win about three quarters of the time, and we're just hard pressed to see any meaningful difference whatsoever.
00:12:38:12 - 00:13:06:14
Paul Gugliuzza
And so, you know, it's a it's a it's a sad story, as Jordi suggested, to the extent that, like, look, it really does make no difference what someone looks like to whether they're going to win or lose on behalf of their client. And it's sad to see that nevertheless, inequalities persist. But I suppose one silver lining is that like, you know, at least in Federal Circuit patent cases, justice appears to be colorblind and and gender blind in the sense that, you know,
00:13:06:18 - 00:13:17:26
Paul Gugliuzza
The Court you know, whatever say what you will about the Federal Circuit and its decisions, one thing that seems clear is it's not making decisions based on the identity of the lawyers who appear before it.
00:13:17:29 - 00:13:57:13
Rachel Rebouché
Well, I would just qualify that if I may. I'm not sure. It says that the courts are colorblind or gender blind. I'm not sure that that's the leap that we could take. But I do think it suggests that something is happening at the by the point... one other way to think about it is that by the point you get to the argument having like you could think about it this way, if you were able to, you know, if you overcome the hurdles to get to the level where you're making these arguments, then you've had maybe 20 conversations already, like the kind that April had in June.
00:13:57:13 - 00:14:30:19
Rachel Rebouché
And and at that point, there are other factors that then start to intervene that make success more likely than not. But no, I'm not in disagreement. I just I think that it's probably a complex picture of why these win rates don't look like, you know, don't don't mimic a pattern of then people losing if they're underrepresented generally at the bar that argues the cases.
00:14:30:21 - 00:14:31:15
Jordana Goodman
00:14:31:24 - 00:14:33:13
April Isaacson
Go ahead. Well, one
00:14:33:13 - 00:14:58:03
Jordana Goodman
more thing that I think is important to note is that we don't have a lot of women of color in our sample in general. So finding a lack of statistical significance with a really small sample is is kind of expected. And so we're really hoping that one day, maybe in the next ten years, we can see a growth of representation in terms of oral arguments at the Federal Circuit.
00:14:58:03 - 00:15:22:07
Jordana Goodman
And maybe we could recode and see if things have have changed for for better or for worse, both in terms of representation and and win rates. I completely agree with Rachel that we're we're seeing the end result of a very, very long process because it takes years for somebody to be able to get the opportunity to argue in the first place.
00:15:22:09 - 00:15:45:07
Jordana Goodman
And by then maybe there have been significant changes in how somebody is viewed. Maybe somebody is viewed as the exception. Maybe a client has asked for this specific person because they've been with them for a certain amount of time. Maybe oral arguments don't matter very much. There is there's a lot of options that we can definitely looking at in the future as well.
00:15:45:07 - 00:15:48:12
Jordana Goodman
And this sample is just kind of a start.
00:15:48:15 - 00:16:11:00
April Isaacson
Yeah, well, the patent litigators aren't going to want to hear that oral arguments don't matter. But you're right. I mean, a lot of times in district court, it certainly doesn't matter. But, you know, the Fed Circuit is where we try to put all of our eggs. Yeah, yeah, no, I'm just teasing. But the one thing that also the composition of the court, I think, is important in terms of, you know, for example, my panel, I had a Hispanic male, so you can guess who that is,
00:16:11:00 - 00:16:30:02
April Isaacson
and then I had a female and then a white male. And the thing that was really cool, too, is the Hispanic Law Students Association was there and they were waiting for the panel draw. And then they so they all came, which was really fun for me. And then afterwards, the the woman who argued against me, we took a photo together outside.
00:16:30:07 - 00:16:57:14
April Isaacson
Don't tell anybody ha ha because we were like, we want to share it because it's so, so cool that it's two women. But, you know, the the other thing that I thought about is in terms of STEM and you brought up, Jordi, STEM, I if you know, this is just me kind of my anecdotal off the top of my head having done patent litigation for 25 years, I can only think of one of the female sort of in that smaller group that argues that doesn't have a STEM background.
00:16:57:17 - 00:17:22:08
April Isaacson
Whereas I can think of most of the men that I know that have argued numerous times do not have a STEM background. So and it goes back to one of the things you talked about in your piece was this It used to be more boutique firms, and then it became these large law firms. And I feel like based on my experience, that it's been men that were sort of maybe litigators and then sort of became patent litigators, but don't actually have technical degrees
00:17:22:15 - 00:17:36:01
April Isaacson
and that that seems to me I don't think there was any kind of data set that was mined for that. But I'd be curious like women in terms of the percentage that have STEM degrees versus the men. Thoughts on that?
00:17:36:03 - 00:18:22:06
Paul Gugliuzza
Yeah, we said we don't have the you know, whether we weren't able to code for whether a lawyer has the technical background. You know, I think that I mean, obviously you pretty much have to collect that information directly from the lawyers, which would be pretty difficult in a dataset as large as we have. But to April's point, I mean, I think one of the reasons or I guess one overlapping group of one group of lawyers who overlapped significantly with our data set of patent advocates at the Federal Circuit are specialist Supreme Court advocates who are, you know, the household names who are arguing multiple Supreme Court cases each term.
00:18:22:08 - 00:18:58:08
Paul Gugliuzza
A lot of them also show up towards the top of our data set. And so that, you know, it it suggests a lot of things. One, it reflects through the mainstreaming of patent practice. Two, most of those lawyers are at big firms as April suggested. And three, their specialty is high stakes appellate litigation, not patent law, but patent law is, you know, for a lot of you know, for for the cases that sort of the top end, they’re high stakes cases.
00:18:58:08 - 00:19:26:05
Paul Gugliuzza
And so, you know, the big corporate parties are going to look for the lawyers they're comfortable handling high stakes matters, whether it's patents, whether it's antitrust, whether it's securities, what have you. And those are the lawyers who are getting tapped most frequently for the biggest cases. And so to the extent that, you know, the skill set clients are looking for is appellate, not patents.
00:19:26:07 - 00:19:44:07
Paul Gugliuzza
That's why you're going to see the Supreme, you know, the overwhelmingly male Supreme Court extra advocates showing up in Federal Circuit patent appeals because they have the appellate skills. And if that's what they're looking for, whether they have patent skills doesn't really matter so much.
00:19:44:09 - 00:20:13:22
April Isaacson
Well, a little bit of that, what you just said and then also the data about the kind of elite group of folks that, you know, that have done the most arguments. One could look at it and play devil's advocate and say, well, yeah, if I have a high stakes case, that's a district court and I lost and I want to appeal and I want to win, then I'm going to pick one of these people and then it's going to sort of be kind of the self-fulfilling prophecy that I got to keep using the same person, the same person, which I kind of feel like is the story of my career, right?
00:20:13:23 - 00:20:29:13
April Isaacson
Just seeing that constantly happen. And it's usually the white men that a lot of them were born on third base, as they say, and thought they hit a triple, you know, and think, I work really hard. So do I, you just have a lot more advantages than I did. So I know it's kind of what are your thoughts on that?
00:20:29:13 - 00:20:43:06
April Isaacson
Because that I appreciate those data and the numbers don't lie. But at the same time, then I have concerns that some people will have a takeaway is, yeah, see, this is why I keep using the same group of people that I've been using for 15 years.
00:20:43:06 - 00:21:12:06
Paul Gugliuzza
Yeah. So let me let me just elaborate a little bit on what we found in that Rachel and Jordy can jump in as well. So what we found and what April's referring to is although there are no differences in win rates among various demographic race, gender groups, one group of lawyers we did find wins much more frequently at the Federal Circuit are a group of roughly 90 lawyers out of about 2,500 total who've argued ten or more cases over the ten year period that we studied. So
00:21:12:09 - 00:21:42:11
Paul Gugliuzza
we like the most frequent advocates you can think of. They win, particularly in representing an appellant right, trying to overturn the judgment below. They win over 40% of the time compared with the remaining popular population of appellate lawyers who win less than a quarter of the time. So the really big gap, you know, one really big gap we find is if you're a frequent advocate, when you're able to convince the Federal Circuit to overturn the judgment below way more frequently than everyone else.
00:21:42:11 - 00:21:46:26
Paul Gugliuzza
And so I'll let Jordi and Rachel maybe comment on some of the implications of that finding.
00:21:46:29 - 00:22:25:29
Rachel Rebouché
Well, I think that, you know, I think it's a little tracks of some of our earlier conversation that the and I think you said this April about this self-fulfilling prophecy. You know, as this litigation gets moved to bigger and bigger law firms with more and more resources, as as the bar becomes smaller and more specialized and more expert, you know, the kind of I hate to say it this way, but the kind of celebrity status of being one of these top litigators who's always before the Federal Circuit, who's always for the Supreme Court, you know, it has it it has that snowball effect.
00:22:25:29 - 00:23:10:09
Rachel Rebouché
And I think, you know, what we're identifying is what we're trying to disentangle is that that those resources, that infrastructure that makes that possible with what can be the perception that there's some kind of inherently merit-based or naturalized or, you know, a system that perpetuates that privilege that is somehow neutral. And I think at the core of what we're arguing is that none of it's neutral, none of it's just a happenstance of one person being just better at law than, you know, their person. Of
00:23:10:18 - 00:23:39:07
Rachel Rebouché
course, we know that there is a complicated intersection of various factors that help some people succeed and are impediments to success for others. And those correspond with race and gender and race and gender and a lot of other identities, but also a lot of other opportunities that people have or do not have in their in the course of their professional development.
00:23:39:09 - 00:24:02:20
Jordana Goodman
I also don't fault clients if they want to choose somebody who wins more often and they have the money to hire them, that's not a problem necessarily, right? Like people want to win. I don't want people to think that anything in this paper says, you must choose somebody because of their gender or you must choose them because of their race or the intersection thereof.
00:24:02:26 - 00:24:41:07
Jordana Goodman
That's not what this paper is about. That's never what diversity, equity, inclusion is about. The idea of a firm having elite people is normal and natural. But for a firm to thrive for decades to come, they know that the senior partnership needs to start turning over and giving more junior associates opportunities. And the problem, I think, is what what April was pointing out in terms of the the differences in women's degrees and men's degrees, which isn't here, but I suspect is true, is that sometimes women might need to prove themselves more than a man.
00:24:41:14 - 00:25:20:19
Jordana Goodman
Sometimes a person of color needs to prove themselves more than a white man does, because the people in leadership will often see somebody who will succeed them as somebody who looks like them. And it'll be hard to change their minds. We're hoping, though, that if you can tell the people who are choosing those next in line that they are selection might be the better off if you left race or gender or both out of the picture and you will still have the same economic benefit.
00:25:20:19 - 00:25:40:00
Jordana Goodman
Or potentially it doesn't look like our data is really showing that you're going to have a detriment if you choose somebody who is a woman or choose somebody who is Black or Hispanic or any combination thereof, then we're hoping that when they're making that choice, they will actually make it on the merits of the litigator.
00:25:40:02 - 00:26:08:10
April Isaacson
Well, and one of the things that was interesting from some of the data on the figures was, as you I think Paul had mentioned from the get go, is that white men, it's 82%. If you're just looking at oral arguments generally 82% when 50% of the law school graduates are female. Right? So you have 82%, 11% white women, which to me is like shocking, but even more so, 5% men of color and then women of color,
00:26:08:10 - 00:26:34:10
April Isaacson
2%. Right? Including all women of color. And like you said, that there's not much data there, Jordi, to sort of like, you know, kind of slice and dice that. But then when you get to the government in which you're talking about, you know, the attorneys arguing on behalf of the government, you have white women at 38%, white men at 47%, women of color at 12%, and then men of color at 3%.
00:26:34:10 - 00:26:42:27
April Isaacson
And there's a note that it exceeds exceeded the proportion of the total population of lawyers. Talk about kind of your takeaways from those data.
00:26:42:27 - 00:27:08:05
Rachel Rebouché
Well, I think this is something that came up for us in the off the first piece as well, which was I think that the three of us were really able to pull out, but, you know, and it's on the back of a conversation with a lawyer who really flagged for us the tradition of government work, that if you write the brief, you argue the case.
00:27:08:07 - 00:27:49:11
Rachel Rebouché
And so I think it's you know, I'll just say first, I think, you know, that that is a different way by which to choose who stands up and argues a case that clearly has repercussions for the representation of people arguing cases because that's not how it necessarily works at the law firm. And that that that kind of essentially a system that doesn't depend on discretion, a client's discretion, on a supervisor's discretion, on a colleagues discretion.
00:27:49:14 - 00:28:08:05
Rachel Rebouché
You know, there's something to learn there. And it's it's also, I think, a testament to how the government has hired. I think it's also a testament to the real pursuit of representation at the patent bar for when when arguing on behalf of the government.
00:28:08:07 - 00:28:32:17
Paul Gugliuzza
Yeah. I mean, one of the things we really want to push back on in this paper is the conventional wisdom that the sole reason we don't find women and people of color working in patent law is because women and people of color don't have the STEM backgrounds necessary to practice patent law. Right? To be sure, there are inequalities in STEM, and they're more pronounced in certain fields of STEM than in others.
00:28:32:24 - 00:29:03:12
Paul Gugliuzza
But the fact that when we look at government patent lawyers, there are more women and more people of color than in the in the overall populate a greater proportion of men, sorry, a greater proportion of women and a greater proportion of people of color than in the total population of lawyers. Right? Not just patent lawyers suggest that there are women, there are people of color who are willing and able to do patent practice at a very high level.
00:29:03:18 - 00:29:23:10
Paul Gugliuzza
And they're being excluded in the private sector but included in the government. And and so, you know, although as I said, those inequalities are there in STEM to be sure. Right? They're not the only reason why we see the disparities that we see in patent practice
00:29:23:12 - 00:29:48:10
April Isaacson
Well what do you think about now there's the different programs like LEAP and things of the like where it's trying to make sure that opportunities are given to more junior attorneys and in particular, you know, thinking about women and people of color and how that's going to maybe change the metrics, because the fact is, I see these data and I don't feel like things have changed that much.
00:29:48:10 - 00:30:02:05
April Isaacson
I mean, this like these little teeny tiny, like one step forward, three steps back kind of thing. But then I want to be hopeful about that for the up and coming attorneys that maybe things will be different. What are your thoughts?
00:30:02:07 - 00:30:41:29
Jordana Goodman
I like that there are programs that address issues. I would love to see data backing any program that we have to see effective they are. I see some firms that are doing amazing, amazing work trying to include more people and succeeding at at different rates. And I see some paying lip service and I really want to make sure that anything that we are sending people to in order to kind of improve their chances of success is is data backed and really is is showing some kind of effort.
00:30:42:01 - 00:31:08:19
Jordana Goodman
I'm also hopeful that even though we have some incremental progress and it's very slow, I'm really hopeful that in the next, let's say, 20 years, we're going to have a massive change in representation. And the reason is because if you continue to see a small increase, there should be more people in leadership who are people of color,
00:31:08:19 - 00:31:38:24
Jordana Goodman
there should be more women, there should be more women of color. And if they also have the same preferences of choosing people who look like them, then we should see some progress in terms of representation. I also think that even though there are quite a few people who argue before the Federal Circuit who have STEM degrees, I am increasingly telling my students that you do not need a degree in STEM to be a patent litigator.
00:31:38:26 - 00:31:56:05
Jordana Goodman
And I don't know if the conventional wisdom is changing in terms of who law firms are hiring versus who government groups are hiring. But I'm very much hopeful that we are not going to be looking at somebody's degree to see whether they're going to succeed.
00:31:56:08 - 00:32:12:09
April Isaacson
absolutely. And I, I am involved in hiring for our firm in summer. You know, the summer program, I'm the Chair of the summer program for the for our office. And I tell people, if you're interested in patent law and you don't mind, you're not afraid of technology and you, you know, are intellectually curious, you can do it.
00:32:12:09 - 00:32:29:12
April Isaacson
Maybe with the exception of having a chemistry degree, if you're going to do hardcore chemistry, then I think that's the one thing I think of as an exception. But yeah, I totally agree with that. The other thing that's interesting and just in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion is that, you know, there's always the information about increasing diversity.
00:32:29:12 - 00:33:00:29
April Isaacson
You get higher quality work, better decision making, greater team satisfaction, more equality in terms of just the the firm itself and also better retention so then what, you know, we're talking about incremental changes on the private sector side. How do you think we get it through the heads of people that are maybe hearing this, but not they're not really hearing it? And how it's not just a nice to have. It's really a need to have on so many different levels.
00:33:01:00 - 00:33:34:25
Rachel Rebouché
I think it's tough because I think that there are incremental changes and then there are deeper changes and, you know, the business case for diversity. So some of what you described is better for your bottom line. It's it's not profit reduction, it's profit enhancement. And then the professional development rationales, it helps retention, it helps morale, it includes it will attract clients to want to want to align with a law firm that values diversity, equity and inclusion.
00:33:34:27 - 00:34:02:09
Rachel Rebouché
You know, I think all of that, none of that is bad. And I don't think that those justifications are wrong. But I think that what we try to show in the paper is, you know, those those justifications for diversity have been around for a long time. And they they tend to get blunted in an area like this one where there is a lot of conversation that suggests, well, you just need to lean in and you just need to do this.
00:34:02:09 - 00:34:48:03
Rachel Rebouché
Or if you only had a STEM background or if you only went to school or, you know, and some of those some of those explanations aren't explicit, you don't look like me. But gosh, they really tend to align in practice with, you know, with with with race and with gender, with the intersection of the two. And so I think it's not that it's not just to problematize the business case for diversity, but it's to suggest that what's also at work here is hard to change because what what change might necessitate deeper and lasting representation of
00:34:48:09 - 00:35:37:04
Rachel Rebouché
that kind of change is cultural. And it's cultural at the level of of the incentives and disincentives. Also how we recognize and award success, what support and assistance we give caregivers, how we think about corporate life. And in that, you know, that's, you know, that's a thorny problem. But I think one of our goals has been to, again, be in conversation with people who are also thinking about why the status quo stays the status quo and what levers of power would you actually have to push in order for the kind of change that DEI seeks to achieve to happen?
00:35:37:07 - 00:35:53:12
April Isaacson
And Jordi, you had mentioned earlier perceived race and I love you can explain kind of what that means in terms of the datasets that you looked at and why that's important as opposed to how one self-identifies per race.
00:35:53:14 - 00:36:25:17
Jordana Goodman
Sure. So I think discrimination can exist regardless of if it is self-identified race or perceived race. But oftentimes not going into a courtroom and announcing your gender or announcing your race, it's it's what's perceived. And so when we're looking at discrimination, especially with with win rates and with potential choices of who is going to argue before the Federal Circuit, we're looking at how might they be perceived by others in terms of their race, in terms of their gender.
00:36:25:24 - 00:37:00:02
Jordana Goodman
And so what we did was we found the pictures of over 90% of the people in the sample, and we had a group of research assistants and and we also coded to see how they would perceive this person by race using the U.S. Census data and US census categories. We recognize that these are not all inclusive, and because the majority of Hispanic people would identify Hispanic as a race, we also included that as a category in our in our data, even though the census doesn't treat it as the same.
00:37:00:04 - 00:37:26:24
Jordana Goodman
But the reason why it's important to identify perceived race in our in our sample is because you don't check a box, usually, when you join a law firm telling somebody what your race is, often that is coded by other people and you are treated that way by other people. There are certainly things that you can find on your resume.
00:37:26:25 - 00:38:01:26
Jordana Goodman
If you went to an HBCU, you might be coded as Black. If you went to an all women's undergraduate college, you're probably coded as a woman. But that can change. We also note that we didn't find anybody in our in our sample who was was transgender or was openly transgender or changed or was non-binary. We didn't see anybody having kind of different pronouns over the course of their career from that limited research we were able to do.
00:38:01:28 - 00:38:27:18
Jordana Goodman
But but that's why we think that perceived race and perceived gender are both important to to code for. And using that here takes the burden off of people saying I identify as this and that is why you were discriminated against me. And I think it puts the the blame and ownership on the people who are making the decisions to exclude.
00:38:27:25 - 00:38:31:22
Jordana Goodman
And I think that's also why it's important to look at perceived race not just self-identify it.
00:38:31:24 - 00:38:39:16
April Isaacson
And then there's another term that you use in the piece that's called interrupting bias. Can you talk about what you're referring to?
00:38:39:22 - 00:39:21:02
Paul Gugliuzza
Yeah. So the interrupting bias, so that term, it may predate this, but where we were drawing from is an American Bar Association committee on diversity in the legal profession. It reports a couple of years a couple of years old now called interrupting you can't change what you can't do. “You Can't Change What You Can't See: Interrupting Bias in the Legal Profession.” And it is a really nice roadmap of concrete, objective and realistic steps that that law firms in particular can take to counter some of the racial and gender biases that are endemic to the profession.
00:39:21:09 - 00:39:38:09
Paul Gugliuzza
But Rachel, I think a few minutes ago mentioned the term add diversity and stir, which refers this notion of like we just bring in more women, more people of color into the firm. The problem will fix itself, right? The studies like ours and many others suggest that, you know, there's been women, there's been people of color joining the profession for a long time,
00:39:38:12 - 00:40:33:19
Paul Gugliuzza
and yet these historic underrepresentation continue. And so what the Interrupting Bias report by the ABA does is it it it gets closer to challenging the economic incentives and social norms that we think are really driving the lack of diversity and inclusion that we see in studies like ours. And so it provides, you know, sort of bullet point lists of how can you sort of ensure that, you know, good assignments go to a wider range of people, that people aren't punished in performance evaluations and in salary reviews because they've done work that tends to fall to people who don't look like the more senior partners who are making the decisions.
00:40:33:19 - 00:40:57:28
Paul Gugliuzza
And so it's really what at least, you know, speaking for me who's, you know, lowly lowly patent law professor here, you know, it's really eye opening to see people who've thought about these issues very deeply develop, a set of best practices that like they seemed like great ideas to me. So I was my sort of, you know, what ought we do or what are the takeaways to increase Diversity,
00:40:57:28 - 00:41:03:04
Paul Gugliuzza
Inclusion in patent law were heavily influenced by that report, which I thought was very thoughtful.
00:41:03:07 - 00:41:09:02
April Isaacson
One of the other things you talk about in the pieces, mentorship and sponsorship and how important is that?
00:41:09:05 - 00:41:36:03
Paul Gugliuzza
Yeah, that's something else that Rachel, I’ll let Rachel and Jordi respond, but that's also one of the one of the points in the Interrupting Bias , as I interrupt you, the report is another is, you know they call it not mentorship, but I think they refer to it more as sponsorship, right? In the sense of like finding a very particular person to sort of advocate for you, you know, not just be a sounding board, but like be an advocate.
00:41:36:06 - 00:42:00:00
Rachel Rebouché
So. And I agree. I think the report is important. I want if I if I were to add something, it was it would be just to underscore how much study time effort has been put into thinking about representation in the legal profession. I mean, that, you know, the ABA, which I think we note in the footnote
00:41:59:22 - 00:42:01:00
Paul Gugliuzza
00:42:01:03 - 00:42:37:20
Rachel Rebouché
excluded, was built on the purpose of exclusion and its historic founding and now has entire, you know, entire sections, staff, resources totally dedicated to the question of diversity in the legal profession. You see a similar concentration of effort and resources in thinking about diversity in the legal academy. So it's not for lack of interest or lack of wanting to understand the scope of the problem and wanting to think about how to address it.
00:42:37:23 - 00:43:09:08
Rachel Rebouché
And I think that it's very promising, just as we've said, that there are these these roadmaps and these models and a way of trying to think collectively about diversity in the legal profession. And, you know, it's just such a it's such a thorny problem because one reason to think about this as a systemic set of issues is to understand that there are the short term and medium term solutions that are programmatic, that are training, that are education, that are relationship based.
00:43:09:10 - 00:43:37:01
Rachel Rebouché
And then there is a longer term, you know, the longer term set of conversations about how we structure our professional and economic lives of, you know, the example of sponsorship is a great one that's really important. Anyone who's had a mentor will tell you the importance of that mentor in teaching them about a profession and giving them advice and going to bat for them.
00:43:37:04 - 00:44:31:01
Rachel Rebouché
But when you become a mentor, you realize it's not a cost free exercise. You also have to expend then time and energy to undertake those, you know, those responsibilities. And and you know, we reflect on the paper and in previous work that that too has gendered consequences and repercussions. So the inclusion tax, the being asked to be the mentor, being asked to be on committees and to you know I think I think certainly three of us on this call, maybe four, but three of us probably have felt a more gendered approach to service at our respective jobs because of, you know, because we are women or identify as women, I should say.
00:44:31:04 - 00:44:50:07
Rachel Rebouché
And so, you know, so I think, again, it's I this is not to leave the conversation on a point of disillusionment, but it is, I think, to again interject that just the sheer complexity of the questions that the paper puts on the table.
00:44:50:10 - 00:45:17:20
Jordana Goodman
Absolutely. And and when we're talking about mentorship, I think there are times where people want to pair like versus like with like And so you will pair a woman with a woman or a junior associate who is a person of color with a senior associate who is a person of color. And that adds to the burdens of success of people who are often demanded to do more than their white and male counterparts.
00:45:17:22 - 00:45:44:16
Jordana Goodman
But I'd like to just insert a personal story because I worked at a couple of law firms before I became an academic, and I was always seeking out mentors who looked like me. And it wasn't until my third law firm when I had a white male partner tell me, “why don't you put your name on things? Why are you always signing my name on the document and sending it out?”
00:45:44:19 - 00:46:16:04
Jordana Goodman
And it just never occurred to me that I could take credit for myself until I had a white male mentor tell me that that was his default. And so I think it's really important that the entire group of law firm gets together and has standards for how they are going to promote people, how they are going to mentor people, how they're going to help them through the system, and explain to people who's, you know, advocating for credit and advocating for their space and advocating for their good projects.
00:46:16:04 - 00:46:39:05
Jordana Goodman
That's not their default. To have the mentor come in regardless of their race, regardless of their gender, regardless of a sexual orientation. Come in and say, I see the value in this person is is immeasurable. And I sometimes think that the white men in the law firm, because they already are listened to the most and they have the loudest voice, can make the biggest change.
00:46:39:12 - 00:46:58:11
Jordana Goodman
They're often a bit afraid to engage in diversity, equity, inclusion conversations because they don't feel like they can actually engage in things. But everyone plays a part in this from the junior associate who can advocate for themselves to the senior partner who knows that something is going on in their law firm and they need to fix it.
00:46:58:14 - 00:47:17:04
April Isaacson
Well I've had a few people over the course of the last four years, I guess that we've been doing the podcast reach out and say, you know, “I listened to what you're saying and I guess I don't know how to make a change, right? Or how to just how to just take the messages and be able to actually implement them.”
00:47:17:04 - 00:47:24:27
April Isaacson
So I appreciate reaching out to to say, you know, I want to help. I don't know how to help. What would your message be to someone like that?
00:47:24:29 - 00:48:05:24
Jordana Goodman
I think the first thing, if you want to help is to ask people at the firm what they want. I would really have loved to be asked as a first year, “where do you see yourself in ten years?” And the answer not be default to partner, but to be, “where are you going to succeed?” And then have my mentors tell me what steps I would need to take to get there while recognizing that society might have different expectations of me and advocate when I'm being told, “hey, why don't you help out and clean up the conference room” for them to be saying, “actually, no, that's not what she should be doing right now.”
00:48:05:27 - 00:48:24:13
Jordana Goodman
And I think I think that's a really great start, is looking internally at your space and seeing what you can control. Because there are there are so many factors that we've talked about here that are outside of a law firm's control. You can't control who is going to apply to your law firm. You can't control what state you're in.
00:48:24:16 - 00:48:44:19
Jordana Goodman
You can't control whether the client wants to settle. But there are little things that you can do to make sure that things are equitable and to make sure that you aren't pushing people where you where they don't want to go. And I think I think bridging that gap and asking those questions is a really great step.
00:48:44:20 - 00:49:14:11
April Isaacson
So earlier, Rachel, you talked about the inclusion credit and it was kind of along the lines of what you were just talking about, Jordi. I don't know how to explain it sometimes to people like from the perspective of us, you know, we're three white women. How hard that can be sometimes, the burden of having to do all the extra that you do not get compensated for and just it's sort of expected that you're going to do all these different extra things.
00:49:14:16 - 00:49:24:03
April Isaacson
I call sometimes just it's death by a thousand paper cuts a little bit, right? It's just all these things that add up and that that can be exhausting at times.
00:49:24:06 - 00:49:46:00
Jordana Goodman
Yeah, I think teaching people the power of saying no would be great. And you're mentioning that we are three white women. Like, that's absolutely true. And I have seen my colleagues who are Black women, Hispanic women, Asian women having so many more burdens than than I would have.
00:49:46:03 - 00:49:47:06
April Isaacson
Absolutely. You know,
00:49:47:06 - 00:50:16:13
Jordana Goodman
it's it's a cycle that doesn't end. And it is work that isn't credited. If a if a government organization is is there and retaining women and people of color at one rate compared to the private firms, I really wonder if they're firm is being run differently. What would a what would a private firm look like if they had the same hours as a government attorney?
00:50:16:13 - 00:50:39:06
Jordana Goodman
What would they look like if they had the same child care responsibilities that they or child leave policies? What would it look like if they had the same work allocation? What would it look like if there was a default of you write the brief, you argue the case? So I don't want law firms to kind of take away that, private firms are just different.
00:50:39:09 - 00:50:47:05
Jordana Goodman
There are law firms that are succeeding. And I would I would really encourage them to to to look at that in terms of in terms of inclusion as well.
00:50:47:08 - 00:51:37:20
Rachel Rebouché
And you could I mean, and related to what Jordy said, you could also think about, you know, that if this is a limited solution, but you could attach compensation to the number of people that you mentor. You could, you know, create incentives and disincentives that will reward, you know, behavior that builds a culture of community that is collectively minded that engages, you know, newer attorneys in projects that help, you know, teach business basics or professional development that I mean, you could you could rethink how you reward the kind of service that we all have to engage in to make an institution run.
00:51:37:23 - 00:52:12:07
Rachel Rebouché
So it's an interesting balance between being able to set boundaries and say no, but also understanding that, you know, law firms like law faculties depend on someone doing the work. And it's it's it's when it always becomes the province of one set of people who will not be compensated or rewarded or recognized that work that you start to get the real inequities that we're describing,
00:52:12:07 - 00:52:14:19
Rachel Rebouché
I think, in this conversation.
00:52:14:21 - 00:52:31:09
April Isaacson
Well, and part of it, too, is it's not as quantifiable as, okay, this amount of money came in through an origination credit because I know it's one of the things you talk about in your paper. And Rachel and Paul, you've spoken about it with your other paper when we talked to you a few years ago, is that there's columns.
00:52:31:09 - 00:52:49:26
April Isaacson
I mean, we have spreadsheets, all law firms do, where you can look at how many billable hours you had, how many you had some sort of credit that you got for it. But me being a Managing Partner or a Chair of the summer program or mentoring, I don't that's not quantifiable, so to speak, in terms of, you know, numbers and data because we're talking about that.
00:52:50:03 - 00:53:04:04
April Isaacson
So then maybe, Paul, how do you get a law firm to realize that is something that's important, that's not quantifiable, but is incredibly important into the richness of the culture of the firm and then the future?
00:53:04:06 - 00:53:24:05
Paul Gugliuzza
Yeah, I mean, I think the answers are try to figure out ways to quantify it, right? Make it align on evaluations, performance evaluations. Right? Are you, are you engaging in mentoring activities? What are the service activities? And, you know, I mean, it's I guess it's it's easy to say like just just, you know, object, make it objective, right?
00:53:24:08 - 00:53:57:18
Paul Gugliuzza
Make make it, you know, put put a number on it. And maybe that's doable, but obviously, like to convince those in power to put a number on it is itself a fraught task. Right? So it's like it can be done, but it comes back to changing the culture right? Like doing that culture shift, tweaking the levers of power to to to create a willingness to put numbers on those sorts of activities.
00:53:57:18 - 00:54:25:00
Paul Gugliuzza
And so, you know, as Rachel said, this are it's complicated stuff. Right? And I think, you know, I guess just what a hope of these sorts of papers is, just is is maybe not the most satisfying thing. But I think it's important that we're just honest about how how difficult and complicated and entrenched these inequalities are because, you know, the dose of realism, you know, can be a little disappointing that we're not made more progress.
00:54:25:03 - 00:54:49:27
Paul Gugliuzza
But like until we honestly, like, assess what these problems are and how incredibly difficult they are to change, we have no chance of changing that right? They may still be very difficult, but at least we know or at least we know the problems now and we know some steps that might make at least a small difference. And that's better than pretending that they're these easy, easy to solve problems when they're absolutely not.
00:54:50:00 - 00:55:14:24
Jordana Goodman
Yeah, if firms decided that they wanted to do a a test of this, I would love to see firms have billable hour for a month where if you are mentoring, we're going to put it as a line. If you if somebody pops into your office with a question. That's the point one, right? Like every time somebody popped into my office, I lost my train of thought and then they have to come back and you know. And it took time.
00:55:14:24 - 00:55:40:14
Jordana Goodman
And I think more people popped into my office than they did my male colleague. But if I could bill it and I could show that at the end of the month, then either the firm partners could say, “we need to change the structure so that people aren't, you know, barging in on somebody more often than another, or we need to credit them for this disparity at the firm while we're fixing it, or both.”
00:55:40:16 - 00:55:46:22
Jordana Goodman
And so if a firm wanted to run that kind of experiment, I think we'd we'd be really open to that as a next step.
00:55:46:24 - 00:56:01:16
April Isaacson
Now, it's interesting because there's investment credit, but it's not billable credit as opposed to what you're saying is it's billable. And you're right, because if I add up, whether it's coaching, mentoring, things like that, it definitely adds up if you keep track of every point one. Yeah.
00:56:01:18 - 00:56:28:23
Rachel Rebouché
And I think it's, you know, I think it's worth also noting that there's a lot of highly rewarded activity that is not billable, that people have to have. Law firms have figured out how to confer prestige and reward, you know, So it's not as if the billable hour is this pertinent system of measuring profitable behavior to a law firm.
00:56:28:23 - 00:56:50:15
Rachel Rebouché
I mean, the dinners, the going out, the happy hours, the socialization and lunchroom talks, there's you know, it's it's interesting that it's that mentorship is impossible to quantify. But other things that get a lot of attention and reward, you know, somehow we're okay with this kind of thing.
00:56:50:17 - 00:57:14:26
April Isaacson
Yeah, you are speaking to me because I've seen situations where there might be a man. It's a white man usually that has some client relationship and they don't actually bill high hours, but they get credit in their columns that's probably counted in more than one person's column. And then all of a sudden you build like twice as much in them as they did in a year.
00:57:14:26 - 00:57:39:08
April Isaacson
But yet they're making substantially more than you because they get this like client credit, whereas a woman or a person of color might have this mentoring these other things that are considered unquantifiable. One thing, Paul, question for you is, as a white man, what is what would be your advice or some thoughts you would give to some of the men that still maybe don't really get it?
00:57:39:08 - 00:57:52:27
April Isaacson
Again, they're kind of there listening, but are they really hearing and really, really actively listening to this or just thinking it's a bunch of people that are kind of complaining about things and, you know, “I'm doing a great job.”
00:57:52:29 - 00:58:09:13
Paul Gugliuzza
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the what you might look at some of the really, you know, we got to know a lot of some of the nuance, interesting aspects or data. But like the how to go back to like the high level finding of these vast racial and gender disparities you might like it be like, well, that's not surprising, right?
00:58:09:13 - 00:58:33:11
Paul Gugliuzza
Which maybe they're not. But one thing I hope is that the magnitude of those disparities is very eye opening, right? Where like 90% men, 90% white people. That's a huge disparity. It's not like, there's a little bit more inequality in this field than among the population of lawyers as a whole to say nothing of law school graduates.
00:58:33:11 - 00:59:09:25
Paul Gugliuzza
It's like massive inequalities. And so one thing I hope is that, you know, for that population of lawyers is to see that, you know, things are not getting better at all. They're still pretty bad and they might be even worse than you think they are. And so so I guess, you know, one sort of small hope of mine is, you know, even if we all sort of know that, you know, there's these inequalities by highlighting just the magnitude of them, that that inspires a greater awareness of these issues.
00:59:09:25 - 00:59:34:27
Paul Gugliuzza
Right? And again, like, is awareness going to fix all of the problems? Absolutely not. Right. But maybe it makes the small differences. And, you know, we see those numbers start to creep up and that's, you know, maybe that maybe the more realistic goal. Right? We're not going to wipe these entrenched inequalities out overnight. But, you know, if we get a few people to take some small actions, things get a little bit better and those things can add up over time.
00:59:34:27 - 01:00:02:23
Paul Gugliuzza
And I think, you know, we have to take sort of a long range view here because it's taken a long, you know, the the inequalities we see have built up over a long time. And so they're not going to be torn down overnight. Right? They're going to be torn down in an incremental way as well. And so, you know, I think the magnitude of the differences that we see hopefully highlight, you know, like, you know, maybe make make those small changes
01:00:02:25 - 01:00:16:24
April Isaacson
And that maybe goes to one of the takeaways that you had for the paper as we close and we'd love to hear from Rachel and Jordi about this is that you talk about ignoring stark racial and gender disparities will not make them go away. Kind of to your point, Paul
01:00:16:26 - 01:00:40:13
Jordana Goodman
I mean, I don't I don't think that if we turn a blind eye to the problem and we decide that somebody can just be racially blind or gender blind, that this is magically going to suddenly solve itself. We need action to be taken to fix this at a much greater rate than just passively hoping that law schools are going to churn out enough people.
01:00:40:18 - 01:01:07:13
Jordana Goodman
We need people to be very aware that if somebody drops out of the firm or chooses to leave the firm, that a 1 to 1 replacement doesn't fix the problem, that somebody left. I, I think that it is it is so important that everybody recognizes that they are part of the problem or part of the solution. And I don't think that there's very much in between.
01:01:07:13 - 01:01:23:08
Jordana Goodman
And that's everybody from the law school educators who are there sending our students out into the world to the partners that hire them and to their peers who support them through the trials and tribulations that exist or anywhere. When they're going up the ranks.
01:01:23:10 - 01:01:54:21
Rachel Rebouché
And I think that's right. I think pretending that the disparities do not exist, you know, does very little to envision a better future. And it should be a better future that we're envisioning, because recognizing that these patterns persist and it's such stark levels has to tell you something about the difficulty of change has to it has to tell you something about our profession
01:01:54:23 - 01:02:47:16
Rachel Rebouché
and it has to challenge what I think is either the will to say, well, that's not a problem anymore. Look, there's 50% of people in law school that are women. Or to say, well, that's because, you know, someone just needs to try harder. Someone needs a different degree. This shifting back to this individual source of problem solving is, I think, also something that we do because it is difficult to confront that it is not just someone trying harder or getting a different degree or getting a mentor or, you know, doing X, Y or Z, that that kind of individual action is not going to solve problems that are baked into
01:02:47:19 - 01:02:50:20
Rachel Rebouché
how the profession works.
01:02:50:22 - 01:03:17:22
Paul Gugliuzza
I mean, we started this conversation with a question about, like, what are our motivations of the project? I'll say, well, like one motivation for me, as someone who teaches IP courses and teaches patent law courses, I look out at my students every semester. It is a cross-section of different racial identities, gender identities that roughly corresponds to the the population of law students as a whole, which is half women, nearly 40% people of color.
01:03:18:04 - 01:03:35:21
Paul Gugliuzza
In my patent classes, I see those same numbers year in and year out. And look, the population of my patent classes on race and gender lines looks like my first year civil procedure class. And yet in my field of patent law, when I look at some of these high levels of law practice, there are these vast disparities, right?
01:03:35:21 - 01:04:00:27
Paul Gugliuzza
So there's these large cohorts of my students who are being filtered out at some point in the process. That's like that's broken, right? If they're in my classes, they're excelling. They're people who should be successful, right? They're doing all the right things, and yet they're not getting the opportunities at the highest level. That's a problem. And I want to figure out why and I want to try to try to make it better.
01:04:01:05 - 01:04:21:06
April Isaacson
Well, it goes back to Rachel's point in closing, that if you're not part of if you don't want to be part of the problem, you want to be part of the solution. And having excellent papers and conversations like this where we're talking about the problems in a very data driven, the numbers don't lie kind of way, helps us to move forward and point out what's going on.
01:04:21:06 - 01:04:41:10
April Isaacson
And hopefully people, Jordi your students, can have a little bit more hope for the future. And I certainly came away from this myself having more hope for the future in terms of the private practice at a law firm. So thanks all of you for your time. Really appreciate it. We'll put all of the papers we've talked about in the show notes for our our listeners.
01:04:41:10 - 01:04:43:29
Paul and Rachel
So thank you so much. Thank you, April.
01:04:44:02 - 01:04:44:15
Jordana Goodman
Thank you.