At least 17 major law firms have pulled out of a race-conscious internship program that allegedly excluded white applicants, cutting enrollment nearly in half as a federal civil rights investigation intensifies.
The firms, including Kirkland & Ellis, Skadden Arps, Gibson Dunn, Davis Polk, and Simpson Thacher, told the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in formal position statements that they no longer participate in the SEO Law Fellowship, an internship pipeline run by the nonprofit Sponsors for Educational Opportunity. The EEOC shared those statements with Americans for Equal Opportunity, the organization that filed the original discrimination complaint, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
The exodus has gutted the program. SEO placed 58 fellows in 2026, down from 104 the previous year, a drop of roughly 44 percent. The Free Beacon cited a LinkedIn post from a current fellow and internal data it reviewed independently.
SEO, which describes its mission as placing "underrepresented" students at elite firms, declined to comment. But the scale of the withdrawal tells its own story: of the 44 firms originally named in the EEOC complaint, nearly four in ten have now walked away.
Americans for Equal Opportunity, led by president Clegg Ivey, filed the original discrimination complaint with the EEOC last year. The agency did not just open a routine case file. It launched what is known as a "pattern or practice" investigation, a resource-intensive review the EEOC reserves for allegations of systemic discrimination across an industry, profession, company, or geographic area. Those investigations made up less than 0.45 percent of the EEOC's entire caseload in 2023, the agency's own annual performance report shows.
That the commission devoted that level of scrutiny to a fellowship program signals how seriously federal enforcers are treating the allegations.
Ivey's group has not stopped at the original complaint. This month, Americans for Equal Opportunity filed a fresh EEOC charge alleging SEO continued to discriminate. The new filing accuses the nonprofit of bias based on "race (White), color, national origin (American), religion (Christian), and sex (sexual orientation, heterosexual), in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964", the landmark federal law that bars employment discrimination on those grounds.
Ivey framed the principle plainly:
"Applicants should be judged as individuals. Equal opportunity means equal opportunity for everyone."
His organization has characterized SEO as "the largest discriminatory pipeline program in the legal profession." Whether the EEOC ultimately agrees remains an open question, the agency has not announced formal findings, but the sheer number of firms heading for the exits suggests the industry itself has read the writing on the wall.
The withdrawal did not happen in a vacuum. Several of the departing firms had already disavowed diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments as part of settlement agreements with the Trump administration, which has pressed Big Law to abandon race-conscious hiring and programming. SEO itself purged race-related language from its public-facing materials, a tacit acknowledgment that the old framing carried legal risk.
The full list of firms that told the EEOC they are out reads like a directory of the most powerful names in corporate law: Akin Gump, Clifford Chance, Davis Polk, Gibson Dunn, Goodwin Procter, Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, Hogan Lovells Cadwalader, Jenner & Block, Kirkland & Ellis, Mayer Brown, McDermott Will & Schulte, Milbank, Ropes & Gray, Sidley Austin, Simpson Thacher, Skadden Arps, and Weil Gotshal.
These are not small boutiques testing the political winds. They are firms that bill billions of dollars a year, advise Fortune 500 boards, and shape the legal profession's culture from the top down. When 17 of them conclude that a fellowship program is not worth the regulatory exposure, the program's underlying model faces a serious credibility problem.
Ivey has also alleged that SEO "added new preferences" for applicants who "identify as Muslim or Middle Eastern." If true, it would suggest the nonprofit responded to a discrimination investigation by layering on additional identity-based criteria rather than moving toward neutral selection. But the Free Beacon noted that this particular allegation does not appear in the new EEOC filing. The gap between what Ivey has said publicly and what his organization put on paper before the commission is worth watching as the case develops.
Several important questions remain unanswered. How many of the original 44 firms still participate? Has the EEOC reached any interim conclusions? And what specific terms did the Trump administration's settlement agreements impose on the firms that signed them? None of that is publicly clear.
What is clear is the trajectory. A program that once placed more than a hundred aspiring lawyers at the country's top firms now places barely half that number. The firms that built their reputations on meticulous risk assessment looked at a federal civil rights probe and decided the fellowship was a liability. SEO, for its part, has said nothing.
For years, elite institutions treated race-exclusive pipelines as untouchable, noble in purpose, immune to the same civil rights laws that apply to everyone else. The EEOC investigation and the stampede of withdrawals suggest that assumption is collapsing. Equal opportunity, it turns out, is not a principle you get to apply selectively.
