For years, conversations about Black women in professional spaces have frequently centered on one word: resilience. There is truth behind it. Black women have navigated institutions in which they have historically been excluded, underestimated, and underrepresented. The legal profession is no exception. But I believe we have to move the conversation beyond celebrating Black women’s ability to survive difficult environments.

The more important question is this: What does the legal profession gain when Black women are present, practicing, leading, building firms, advising clients, and helping shape the future of the law?

That question matters because Black attorneys remain significantly underrepresented in the United States. According to the American Bar Association, Black lawyers represented approximately 5% of the legal profession in 2024, while Black people represented 13.7% of the U.S. population. The proportion of Black lawyers had remained essentially unchanged over the previous decade. Within law firm leadership, the numbers become even smaller. NALP’s 2025 diversity report found that Black women represented just 1.04% of partners among reporting law firms. Those numbers tell us who is missing, but they do not fully tell us what the profession is missing because they are not there.

Representation Is About More Than Visibility

Representation matters, but not simply because people should be able to look around a courtroom, conference room, law firm, or bar association meeting and see people who look like them. Representation affects which perspectives enter the room, the questions that are asked, which problems receive attention, and whose understanding of family, property, community, wealth, and justice helps inform the practice of law.

Black women do not share one universal life experience or one approach to practicing law. We are not a monolith. But Black women attorneys can bring perspectives shaped by living at the intersection of race and gender, where both can influence access, opportunity, credibility, wealth, and power. Those perspectives belong in the legal profession, not at its margins, but at its center.

The Profession Needs More Than One Definition of Expertise

Law has historically been a profession where certain educational backgrounds, networks, firms, clients, and forms of wealth have carried tremendous influence. That can affect our ideas about what an accomplished lawyer looks like, which clients are considered sophisticated, and whose legal concerns are treated as significant.

Black women attorneys can challenge those assumptions by occupying spaces from which we were historically excluded. But our contribution goes beyond presence. Different experiences can help attorneys identify issues that might otherwise be overlooked, communicate with clients, understand family and community dynamics, and challenge assumptions about who needs sophisticated legal counsel. Diversity does not diminish professional expertise. It expands the profession’s understanding of what expertise can look like.

Why This Matters So Much in Estate Planning

As an estate planning attorney, I think about representation within my own practice area frequently. Estate planning is deeply personal. Clients are asked to discuss money, property, death, disability, family relationships, children, caregiving, inheritance, conflict, and sometimes generations of family history. Those conversations require legal knowledge. They also require trust. 

Yet estate planning has not reached every community equally. In Caring.com’s 2025 survey of 2,541 adults, only 16% of Black respondents reported having a will, compared with 28% of white respondents. A survey cannot tell us every reason behind that disparity, but it underscores that significant estate-planning gaps remain.

Cost, access to attorneys, knowledge about estate planning, family circumstances, wealth disparities, perceptions about who estate planning is for, and experiences with legal and financial institutions can all influence whether someone creates a plan. No single attorney can resolve those structural problems, and simply placing a Black attorney across the table from a Black client does not automatically create trust. But representation can help create another pathway into the conversation.

Estate Planning Is Also About Cultural Understanding

Estate planning is sometimes presented as though it is primarily about financial assets. It is also about people. Property can carry meanings that cannot be captured by an appraisal. A family home may represent stability after generations of housing discrimination. Land may represent a connection to grandparents or great-grandparents. A modest piece of property may be the most significant asset a family has ever owned.

Family members may have informal caregiving arrangements that have existed for decades. A client may be concerned not simply with transferring wealth, but with preventing family property from being lost. Understanding those realities can influence the questions an attorney asks and the way legal options are explained.

This is particularly significant when discussing generational wealth. For generations, Black families in the United States have encountered structural barriers to acquiring, protecting, and transferring wealth. Estate planning cannot erase that history, but it can be one tool for helping families intentionally protect what they have built. That work should include attorneys who understand the communities being asked to engage in it.

Black Women Attorneys Expand Who Legal Services Are For

One of the most important contributions Black women attorneys can make is challenging the idea that certain kinds of legal planning belong primarily to certain kinds of people. Estate planning is a perfect example. People sometimes hear words such as “estate,” “trust,” or “wealth planning” and assume those services are primarily for extremely wealthy families. They are not.

Estate planning may involve deciding who should care for minor children, who can make health care decisions during an emergency, who should manage finances during incapacity, what should happen to a home after death, how an inheritance should be handled, or how family property can be preserved. These concerns matter to individuals and families across income levels, family structures, and communities. Access to guidance should not depend on wealth or whether a family fits traditional assumptions about whom estate planning is for. When attorneys practicing in these areas reflect a broader range of communities, we have an opportunity to challenge those assumptions and work toward equitable access to planning, particularly for communities that have historically been excluded or underserved. 

We Need Black Women in Leadership Too

Increasing the number of Black women who enter law is only part of the issue. The profession must also consider who remains, who advances, who becomes a partner, who becomes a judge, who teaches, who controls resources, and who builds institutions of their own.

NALP’s 2025 data illustrates how substantial that leadership gap remains. Although women represented 29.55% of law firm partners in its reporting population, Black women accounted for only 1.04% of partners. Representation at the beginning of a career matters, but representation where decisions are made matters too. Black women should not only be welcomed into existing institutions. We should have opportunities to shape them.

Sometimes that leadership takes the form of entrepreneurship. Black women who establish their own firms are doing more than creating jobs for themselves. They can build practices around their values, choose which communities and legal needs to prioritize, develop different models for serving clients, and create professional spaces that might not have existed otherwise. That kind of ownership matters.

Beyond the Expectation of Resilience

There is something else I hope changes in conversations about Black women attorneys: I want us to stop treating extraordinary resilience as though it should be a permanent job requirement. Strength can be admirable. Tenacity can be powerful. The ability to navigate barriers can produce creativity, perspective, and determination. But Black women should not have to continually overcome exclusion for the profession to recognize our value.

The goal should not be to create tougher Black women. The goal should be to create a profession where Black women can bring the fullness of their knowledge and abilities without spending so much energy proving that they belong there. Because we already do.

The Legal Profession Is Stronger When More Voices Help Shape It

The case for Black women attorneys is ultimately bigger than representation statistics. It is about the kind of legal profession we want. A profession capable of serving a diverse public needs attorneys with different histories, perspectives, relationships to community, areas of expertise, and ideas about what good legal service can look like.

Clients benefit when they have meaningful choices about who represents them. Communities benefit when lawyers understand the legal issues affecting them. Law firms and legal institutions benefit when the people making decisions do not all arrive at the table through the same pathways. Future Black women attorneys benefit when they can see that there is not simply a place for them in the profession, but an opportunity to lead it.

That is why I believe we have to move the conversation beyond resilience. Black women attorneys are not valuable to the legal profession because we have learned how to endure it. We are valuable because of what we contribute to it: our knowledge, advocacy, leadership, creativity, relationships with our communities, and capacity to help shape a profession capable of serving more people well.

The question should no longer be whether Black women belong in the legal profession. The question is what becomes possible when more of us are given the opportunity to help shape it.

Sources & References

American Bar Association. “Demographics.” Profile of the Legal Profession 2024. American Bar Association. The ABA reports that Black attorneys represented approximately 5% of U.S. lawyers in 2024, compared with 13.7% of the U.S. population. American Bar Association
View the ABA source

National Association for Law Placement (NALP). 2025 NALP Report on Diversity in U.S. Law Firms. March 2026. The report examines racial and gender representation within U.S. law firms, including representation among partners and associates. View the NALP report

Caring.com. “Race and Gender Disparities in Estate Planning for 2025.” Caring.com. Based on its 2025 survey of 2,541 adults, Caring.com reported disparities in will ownership across racial groups, including a 16% will-ownership rate among Black respondents. View the Caring.com research

Bhutta, Neil, Andrew C. Chang, Lisa J. Dettling, and Joanne W. Hsu. “Disparities in Wealth by Race and Ethnicity in the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances.” FEDS Notes. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, September 28, 2020. The report examines longstanding racial disparities in wealth accumulation and household assets in the United States. View the Federal Reserve report