According to recent data, fewer than 20 percent of attorneys arguing in front of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in 2021 were women, and only a handful were women of color, reports Bloomberg News. Women appeared on behalf of law firms 13.6 percent of the time and represented the government 47 percent of the time from May 2020 through December 2021. While Federal Circuit judges have made strides to keep an almost even split between female and male clerks, they struggle with hiring clerks from other underrepresented groups. In response, some judges have begun looking to law schools they wouldn’t traditionally recruit from and expanding criteria to find Latino and Black candidates. Meanwhile, the totemic structure of law firms, which often view appeals as “elite,” can often lead to the few women of color in patent law being shut out. Without more representation, it’s difficult for women of color to see how they can carve out a path to appellate litigation.
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