Disability Pride Month: Join American Bar Association’s #BeCounted Campaign
The Illinois State Bar Association (ISBA) encourages its members to take part in the Commission on Disability Rights of the American Bar Association (ABA)'s #BeCounted campaign in celebration of Disability Pride Month.
"As we celebrate Disability Pride Month, I am proud that the ISBA and I have made it a high priority in selecting its event venues and programming with the goal of reducing the accessibility barriers faced by our members with disabilities," President Sonni Choi Williams said. "We will continue to strive for improvements in ensuring equity and inclusion around disability issues are addressed in a meaningful manner that permeates into the future of the ISBA."
The #BeCounted campaign encourages lawyers with disabilities across the country to add themselves to the ABA's U.S. map. Why? According to the 2021 ABA Model Diversity Survey, “[a]ttorneys with a disability are generally underreported and/or underrepresented at every level and are significantly more likely to work in the “Other Attorney” role compared to all other groups within law firms.” Also, “[f]or the most recent year, most law firms did not hire a single attorney [who] self-identified as . . . having a disability.” Furthermore, according to a 2023 report from the National Association of Law Placement (NALP), only 1.4% of law firm lawyers surveyed self-identified as having a disability. The ABA (and NALP) believe there are more, given that one in four adults in the United States have a disability.
To participate, complete a short digital form, which will ask for your city, state, and disability/ies. The form does not ask for any personally identifiable information.
#BeCounted and express your disability pride!
To learn more about Disability Pride Month, visit the American Bar Association's website.
Member Comments (1)
Thank you to The Bar News for publishing this important call to action. Please consider participating in this #BeCounted campaign if you have any type of disability -- physical, hidden, neurodiversity, mental health, or any other type you identify.
Participation takes less than a minute and is completely anonymous - you input only your self-identified disability and your city and state.
This is an important campaign because there is a startling lack of information regarding the prevalence of disabilities within the US legal population.
With respect to practicing lawyers, the only recent study with information about disabled attorneys is the 2023 Report on Diversity in U.S. Law Firms from the national Association for Law Placement, Inc. (NALP) published in January 2024. This study only surveyed 635 large law firm offices/firms, with a total of 81,034 lawyers, and reflected 1.32% of lawyers with disabilities.
But even those statistics are only a drop in the bucket of lawyer statistics. As of January 1, 2023, there were 1,331,290 active lawyers in the US, according to the ABA National Lawyer population survey. Thus, the NALP survey showing 1.32% disabled lawyers in the large law firm population is based off of a sampling of only 6.08% of the national population of lawyers. There are no statistics regarding disability for the remaining 93.92% of the legal community, especially those working as solo and small firm practitioners, government employees, in-house attorneys, not-for-profits, and non-legal practitioners.
Please stand up and #BeCounted so that we can begin to improve the statistics, and so that disabled attorneys stop being overlooked as an element of the legal community. We do exist and we excel as lawyers.