The 850+ lawyers who work at Ropes & Gray were top graduates
from 88 law schools around the world. Twenty-three law schools
claim at least 10 graduates working at Ropes & Gray. More than
half of our lawyers attended law school in a different city from
the one they currently work in, illustrating the national scope of
our recruiting program. Many obtained graduate degrees in other fields,
or worked in other professions, before going to law school. While
our lawyers have followed widely divergent routes to Ropes & Gray,
they all joined the firm with the same goals in mind: to live in
one of the country's greatest cities, and practice law at the highest
level.
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Like many of our associates, Deborah Greilsheimer (Yale Law School '04) and Michael Burling (Boston University School of Law '03) each worked for a period of time between college and law school: Deborah was a Senior Investment Planning Analyst at Bernstein Investment Research & Management, a unit of Alliance Capital Management, L.P., and an associate at Coopers & Lybrand LLP, while Michael was a chemist at Meta Environmental Inc. specializing in environmental forensics. |
The partnership is young, dynamic, and growing. Over half of
our partners joined the partnership in the last 10 years. Most worked
here for a summer, but each followed an individual path to partnership.
Unlike many firms today, we do not have a multitiered partnership — junior,
senior, income, equity, contract, and the like. Rather, Ropes & Gray
is a true partnership, standing together in a shared professional venture.
Our approach requires talented associates. As our practice continues
to expand, we continue to hire selectively, train broadly, and staff
leanly. We believe that long-term success depends on recruiting the
most talented lawyers and creating opportunities for them at the firm
and in our community. To illustrate, our submission to NALP in 1995
showed 169 associates, 6 of counsel, and 130 partners firmwide, and
our 2009 submission showed 684 associates, 78 other lawyers, and 263
partners — a 336%
increase in the number of lawyers in the firm. While profitability
grew very substantially during that fourteen-year period, we remained
stable in structure, and the number of associates per partner (2.6:1
in April) remained one of the lowest — and one of the best
for associate opportunity — among
all top-tier firms.
Our 2009 reports to NALP contain the following
information as to firm-wide diversity demographics:
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