ABA DISABILITY DIVERSITY STATISTICS

The American Bar Association (ABA) was founded in 1878 by 100 lawyers from 21 states. Today, the ABA has over 400,000 members making it the largest voluntary professional association in the world. The ABA provides law school accreditation, continuing legal education, information about the law, programs to assist lawyers and judges, and initiatives to improve the legal system for the public. The ABA’s primary mission is “[t]o serve equally our members, our profession and the public by defending liberty and delivering justice as the national representative of the legal profession.”

To accomplish its mission, the ABA adopted a new set of goals at the 2009 ABA Annual Meeting. Goal III is “to eliminate bias and enhance diversity.” An objective of Goal III is to “promote full and equal participation in the association, our profession, and the justice system by all persons.”

Stemming from the ABA’s long history of promoting reform of the justice system, the ABA established in 1973 the Commission on the Mentally Disabled to focus on the advocacy needs of people with mental disabilities. After the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the Commission broadened its mission to serve all people with disabilities, and therefore changed its name to the Commission on Mental and Physical Disability Law (Commission). The Commission’s mission is to “promote the ABA’s commitment to justice and the rule of law for persons with mental, physical, and sensory disabilities and their full and equal participation in the legal profession.”

The Commission is composed of lawyers and other legal professionals, many of whom have disabilities. Through its various subcommittees and other programs, the Commission is the only entity within the ABA, and the legal profession, that has a comprehensive focus on all lawyers with disabilities on a national level.

This section estimates the number of people with disabilities in the United States, in the workplace, and in the legal profession.

According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2005, which was released in December 2008, 54.4 million Americans were reported as having a disability—nearly one in five (19%)—with 6.5 million reporting a severe disability. For 2007, Cornell University’s Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Disability Demographics and Statistics (Cornell University)—which uses the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) data (an interim report for the decennial census)—reported 14.9 percent of the U.S. population over the age of five as having a disability, with the largest represented type of disability being a “physical disability” (9.4%).

Recent statistics and attitudinal barriers in society regarding the employment of persons with disabilities in general help explain the small number of lawyers with disabilities who are employed in the legal profession. Based on the ACS numbers, Cornell University reported that in 2007 there were 22,295,000 Americans with disabilities of working age (21 to 64). However, only 36.9% were working, compared to 79.7% for non-disabled persons. Accordingly, approximately 14 million persons with disabilities were not employed, an estimate that is consistent with the statistic that14.5 million of those with disabilities and of working age are actively looking for work.

For full-time/full-year jobs 21.2% of working-age persons with disabilities were employed, compared to 56.7% for non-disabled persons. Median annual salaries for disabled workers were 16% less than those for non-disabled workers. The poverty rate for workers with disabilities was significantly higher (24.7%) than the rate for non-disabled workers (9%). Furthermore, only 12.5% of working-age persons with disabilities held a Bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 36.9% of non-disabled persons. This education disparity helps explain why so few persons with disabilities become lawyers.

Also, statistics regarding employer attitudes and activities are worth noting. The U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy, in a November 2008 report, surveyed a sample of American companies in various industries and of various sizes. The survey found that only 19.1% of the companies surveyed employed individuals with disabilities, and only 13.6% actively recruited people with disabilities. Recently, however, only 8.7% of the companies surveyed had hired someone with a disability within the past year. Moreover, a high percentage of companies, 72.6%, cited the “nature of work being such that it cannot be effectively performed by a person with a disability,” as a hiring challenge.

The ABA conducts an annual census of its lawyer members. According to August 2008 figures, 39,505 of 407,776 ABA members completed the census questionnaire. Of the 30,400 respondents who answered the query “Do you have a disability?,” only 2,033, or 6.69%, answered affirmatively, compared to 7.18% in August 2007. This percentage is far lower than one would expect given the national statistics on the percentage of Americans with disabilities. Extrapolating this figure to the entire ABA membership, approximately 27,280 members would report having a disability for 2008, a decrease of 1,420 from last year. However, the Commission believes this number may be substantially less than the actual number of lawyers with disabilities in the ABA. Many may choose not to answer the question relating to disability status due to confidentiality concerns, while others do not consider themselves as having a disability. Nonetheless, this low figure reflects at least three trends: (1) relatively few college students with disabilities attend law school, and not everyone who attends graduates or passes the bar, (2) due to socioeconomic factors, it appears that a lower percentage of lawyers with disabilities join the ABA than non-disabled lawyers, and (3) a greater percentage of law school graduates with disabilities do not find employment as lawyers.

For 2008-2009, the ABA Office of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar indicated that of 152,005 law students in ABA-accredited law schools, 4,111 (2.7%) were provided accommodations—down from 4,229 (2.82%) for 2007-08 and 3,803 (2.56%) for 2006-07. In the past few years, overall, there have been increases in the number of law students who are given accommodations; however the actual percentage of students who are given accommodations has decreased slightly in the past year.

ACADEMIC YEAR	LSD*/ABA** *number of law students with disabilities provided accommodations ** number of law students in ABA-accredited law schools	PERCENT
2008-09	4,111/152,005	2.70
2007-08	4,229/149,745	2.82
2006-07	3,803/148,697	2.56
2005-06	3,464/140,376	2.47

The National Association for Law Placement (NALP) conducted a study, entitled Jobs & J.D.’s: Employment and Salaries of New Law Graduates—Class of 2007, of the employment rates of law graduates by gender, minority, and disability. 86.1% of 638 law graduates with disabilities were employed, compared to about 92.4% of 28,715 non-minority (men and women) law graduates and 90.3% of 8,548 minority law graduates. 7.4% of disabled law graduates indicated that they were unemployed and seeking a job—almost a 3 percent increase from 2007—compared to 3.8 percent for all non-minority law graduates and 5.3%) for all minority law graduates. Of the 321 salaries reported by graduates with disabilities, the mean salary was $75,096 and the median salary was $57,000. These salaries were considerably lower than the mean and median salaries computed by NALP for non-disabled men and woman graduates: $83,425 and $62,500 (11,162 salaries reported) for women, and $89,060 and 70,000 (12,045 salaries reported) for men. NALP also found that “disabled graduates were less likely to obtain jobs in private practice than the class as a whole—and more likely to obtain government and public interest positions.”

Immediate Past ABA President William H. Neukom, in his ABA Journal’s President’s Message of November 2007, recognized that, although it is difficult to determine the exact degree that the disabled community is underrepresented in the legal community, it is evident that “[l]awyers with disabilities, too, have greater difficulty getting a job after law school and have higher rates of unemployment than lawyers who do not have disabilities.” He called on the legal profession to embrace the objectives of then-Goal IX in order to root out invidious discrimination.

Continuing the ABA’s commitment to include lawyers with disabilities, current ABA President H. Thomas Wells, Jr., will host at the 2009 ABA Midyear Meeting a workshop with ABA leadership on Goal III in order to prepare for diversity summit in Washington, DC on June 18-20. That same week, he will also host—along with this Commission, the Association of Corporate Counsel, and the Minority Corporate Counsel Association—the Second ABA National Conference on the Employment of Lawyers with Disabilities. More information about this conference can be found at http://new.abanet.org/calendar/2nd-National-Conference-on-Employment-of-Lawyers-with-Disabilities.

Since 2004, the ABA President’s Office ensures that applications for presidential appointments include a question regarding disability status. For 2008-09, 46 out of 693 presidential appointments went to persons identified as having a disability, compared to 13 out of 705 in 2007-08. However, none of the 38 ABA members who serve on the Board of Governors, the executive arm of the ABA, identified as having a disability. Currently, 554 ABA members serve in the House of Delegates, the ABA’s policy-making body, but the ABA does not maintain statistics on the number of lawyers with disabilities who are members of the House of Delegates.