They speak in the language of virtue. Their websites glow with sepia-toned portraits of carefully selected associates, each a curated checkbox of race, gender, orientation, and sometimes all three at once, set against banners touting “inclusion,” “equity,” and “commitment to change.” These are not non-profits or social crusaders. These are America’s most powerful law firms, whose partners bill at rates that would make a hedge fund blush, whose real clientele looks less like the United Nations and more like the cocktail hour at a country club, and whose actual impact on poor and minority communities is, in sum, nonexistent.
Big Law firms are perhaps the most conspicuously pious of the professional classes, groaning under the weight of diversity task forces, equity officers, and mandatory unconscious bias training. But for all their sanctimony, one wonders: where are the poor? Where are the huddled masses yearning for legal representation? The answer, of course, is that they are still crammed into the overburdened offices of legal aid societies and public defenders, those underfunded, overworked, unglamorous fortresses of actual service to the vulnerable.
It is not difficult to understand why. A firm that charges $1,200 an hour cannot, by definition, serve the truly marginalized. Diversity, in these circles, is not about lifting the poor. It is about decorating the office. Hiring a black Ivy League graduate, who has his pick of jobs anyway, and paying him $250,000 to generate over a million dollars in billable hours defending an insurance company that takes advantage of the poor is not proof that justice is more accessible, it is proof that capitalism is alive and well.
This is change? This is sacrifice? Congratulations, Big Law, on hiring people to make money off of them. It doesn’t take a whole lot of empathy or sacrifice to employ someone who you’re going to bill out at multiples of what you pay him, does it? It’s what you’ve always done, and it’s actually pretty easy.
But the hard things, these firms do not do. They do not lower their rates to attract clients from the underserved. They do not routinely represent minorities facing criminal charges at reduced rates, or pro bono. They do not send their top litigators to bail hearings or landlord-tenant court. They do not relieve the pressure on public defenders drowning in caseloads.
Go into any criminal courtroom tomorrow and I guarantee what you’ll see is this: a legion of poor and mostly minority defendants represented by public defenders and local attorneys retained for modest flat fees, and absolutely zero attorneys from the big firms that trumpet their diversity and inclusion, because the poor cannot afford them. It’ll be the same story in landlord-tenant court, where the poor are evicted from their homes, and in every other courtroom where the litigants are poor people and not giant corporations.
No, the big virtue signaling firms have no time or place for that. They’re too busy making sure the holiday card looks a lot more diverse than their clientele.
This is not compassion. It is costume.
What, then, is the principle at work? It is this: moral currency without moral cost. Performative diversity is the luxury good of the new ruling class, a way to feel righteous without risking anything. It is the branding of benevolence, the packaging of progressive ideals for sale to other elites. It makes no demands of the rich, no offers to the poor. It is inclusion without sacrifice, empathy without effort, justice without judgment.
But real virtue, if the term is to mean anything at all, must involve tradeoffs. It must cost something. And the fact that it doesn’t, in the case of our gleaming legal empires and billion-dollar conglomerates, tells us everything we need to know. They have taken the language of liberation and used it to build a higher wall, a more exclusive gate, a more impenetrable firmament between themselves and those they pretend to serve.
Let us then dispense with the notion that this is an accident, or that the people responsible are merely confused. They are not confused. They are cowards. They are merchants of illusion. They have learned how to extract praise for what they have not done and claim progress for what has not changed. Their commitment to “diversity” is no more authentic than a costume on Halloween, meant not to reveal, but to disguise.
So the next time you see a law firm tout its multicultural associates, ask yourself the only question that ever mattered: Who is being helped, and who is being paid?
Until there is an answer to that which does not insult the conscience, spare us the brochures.
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