Companies Drop DEI Rules in Hiring Lawyers, Acceding to Trump

Companies in the US have largely abandoned requiring the law firms they hire to meet any diversity thresholds, falling in line with a Trump administration push to strip DEI from the legal profession.

While some companies still survey law firms to ask about their demographic data, most have dropped threats to trim payment or move work away from those that don’t hit specific metrics, according to several law firm leaders.

The shift is not surprising in the face of the administration’s aggressive moves to punish diversity-and-inclusion initiatives across society and its specific action targeting the legal profession. But it frees Big Law firms of the type of client pressure that had been credited with boosting the ranks of underrepresented attorneys.

“There are law firms that mouthed a commitment to diversity and inclusion because they knew that would make them more palatable to companies,” said Paula Boggs, the former general counsel for Starbucks. “In the absence of that pressure they feel no need to engage in it and make the effort.”

Some of the gains made by firms are already showing signs of receding. The share of Black summer associates at law firms declined for the third straight year in 2025, falling to about 8.5%, according to the National Association for Law Placement. The overall proportion of summer associates of color declined to about 38%, the lowest since 2020.

The law firm leaders who spoke on condition of anonymity, did not identify specific corporate clients who have rolled back requirements for outside counsel. Several companies have backpedaled on their own internal DEI plans since Trump’s reelection.

Client Pressure Wanes

Microsoft had one of the longest-running diversity programs for outside lawyers advising the tech giant, dating back to 2008, before discontinuing the initiative. The company tied certain bonuses for law firms to diversity metrics—including race, sex, and sexual orientation—on teams staffing Microsoft matters, as well as firmwide efforts to increase diversity among partners and in leadership roles.

“We do not offer incentives or bonuses tied to the workforce composition of our outside counsel or suppliers,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. The spokesperson declined to say when the company made the shift.

Facebook owner Meta Platforms, Inc. in January 2025 said it would drop diversity requirements for job candidate interviews and outside suppliers. The company had since 2017 required that at least a third of lawyers on teams handling its matters be women or ethnic minorities.

Meta did not respond to requests for comment on whether its outside counsel diversity standards are still in effect. Amazon, which imposed similar diversity standards on firms, also did not respond to comment requests.

“It is an altogether positive development that law firm clients are no longer specifying the racial makeup of the legal teams assigned to represent them,” said Edward Blum, whose advocacy group led one of the suits that three years ago prompted the Supreme Court to strike down affirmative action on college campuses. “The race or ethnicity of a lawyer is irrelevant.”

Blum’s group sued a handful of major law firms over diversity fellowship programs in the wake of the high court ruling. The suits were ultimately dropped after firms widened eligibility pools for their fellowship programs.

Boggs led Starbucks’ legal department for a decade before leaving in 2012 and has worked as a lawyer for Dell and K&L Gates. She said she began workshopping diversity metrics and collaborative programs with outside counsel as early as the late 1990s. Firms were largely receptive to diversity surveys and related queries, which they saw as a way to keep business, according to Boggs, who is also a Bloomberg Law columnist. Her department at Starbucks also had outside law firms’ junior associates, often from underrepresented backgrounds, to work alongside the company’s in-house legal team.

A Starbucks spokesperson said the company no longer surveys outside counsel on diversity, a spokesperson said. The company never tied bonuses to diversity metrics, according to the spokesperson, who declined to say when Starbucks axed the surveys.

Fear Drives ‘Overcorrecting’

The Trump administration has made policing diversity and inclusion efforts a top goal.

“Even if what they’re doing is quite popular and legally safe, if they’ve got the label on it of DEI or something that sounds like DEI, they think that it’s putting a target on their back because the administration doesn’t like DEI,” said David Glasgow, an attorney who advises firms on their diversity measures.

The non-profit Diversity Lab in February said it would stop monitoring law firms’ compliance with the Mansfield Rule, a voluntary program that encourages hiring and retention of more minorities in the legal profession. The group’s leader said at the time that firms were spooked by January letters from Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson warning them about participating in the program.

NALP, which tracks attorney demographic data, said the following month that about a third fewer firms provided attorney demographic data for the organization’s annual survey, putting the future of the decades old benchmark in jeopardy. Firms like Skadden and DLA Piper discontinued employee affinity groups, while Goodwin Procter stopped participating in Mansfield certification and a similar initiative through the Leadership Council for Legal Diversity.

“They are overcorrecting in their behaviors because there’s so much fear of later litigation or scrutiny,” said Nikia Gray, NALP’s executive director.

Some firms are continuing longstanding diversity efforts under new names and different departments, Glasgow said.

“Ultimately organizations do need to decide as a matter of their own values, what kind of organization they want to be, not just from a risk mitigation perspective but in order to attract the talent they want to attract,” he said.