With conservative legal activist Edward Blum taking aim at Perkins Coie and Morrison & Foerster in lawsuits alleging reverse racism in the firms’ diversity fellowship applications, Big Law diversity professionals are poring through years of DEI programming to update language that could open them up to lawsuits or congressional scrutiny from anti-DEI lawmakers like Sen. Tom Cotton—and some law firms may even be putting their DEI programming on pause.

Already, Morrison Foerster updated the language of its diversity fellowship to omit references to specific underrepresented groups, per recent reporting by the Washington Free Beacon. Earlier this week, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher removed references to students from underrepresented groups in a flier distributed to law schools to advertise a $50,000 diversity and inclusion scholarship, although the firm’s criteria for the scholarship never identified underrepresented groups in the first place.

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