Biglaw, Minority Issues

4 Ideas For Advancing Diversity And Inclusion In The Legal Profession

Everyone's always talking about how to improve diversity in the law; here are some concrete ideas for doing so.

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diversity law firm young minority lawyers of colorEarlier this week, I attended an excellent event on diversity and inclusion in Biglaw, sponsored by Big Law Business. Thought leaders from law firms, in-house legal departments, government agencies, and bar associations came together to discuss what Biglaw can do to improve its less then stellar record when it comes to diversity issues.

Based on the wide-ranging discussions, here are four concrete ideas for improving diversity and inclusion (“D&I”) in Biglaw and in the legal profession more generally:

1. Make the business case for diversity and inclusion.

The current president of the ABA, Paulette Brown, pointed out that a good record on diversity is good for business. She cited studies showing that companies with women on their boards of directors outperform companies with all-male boards, that companies with more racial diversity in their employee ranks outperform companies with less, and that law firms with greater diversity outperform firms with less diversity, even controlling for other variables.

This theme received reinforcement from former Orrick partner Patricia Gillette. She argued that D&I advocates for years focused on things like work/life balance and flexible schedules, when instead they should have been focused on things like bringing in business and assuming positions of leadership. By stressing work/life balance over business development, women and minorities were inviting themselves to be pegged as lawyers not interested in business.

As a former rainmaker herself, Gillette argued that in a law firm, those with big books of business hold the power. Less than 10 percent of top Biglaw rainmakers are women or minorities — and if that doesn’t change, then law firm leadership won’t become more diverse.

In a later panel, Dr. Rohini Anand, senior vice president and global chief diversity officer of Sodexo, expanded on the business benefits of diversity. She talked about how a company’s diversity can help it strengthen client ties and recruit the best talent — especially millennials, who prioritize diversity when selecting employers.

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2. Keep track of diversity data within your organization.

As the old business saying (attributed to management guru Peter Drucker) goes, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” If legal workplaces want to improve their diversity, they need to keep track of their diversity (or lack thereof). So it’s important to maintain records about the diversity of your workforce (consistent, of course, with local laws; some speakers pointed out that privacy laws in certain overseas jurisdictions, including various European countries, limit the ability to collect such data).

Erika Irish Brown, global head of diversity and inclusion at Bloomberg, emphasized how her company is famously data-dirven. So Bloomberg maintains many metrics on diversity, and then it asks the leaders of different business units to set diversity goals for themselves reflecting the data available.

Further underscoring the importance of gathering data, Rhonda Mims of Paul Hastings (previously profiled in our pages) announced that her firm will be working together with Bloomberg to conduct further research into D&I issues.

3. Tie part of compensation to progress on diversity.

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If you want to make progress on D&I, you might want to put your money where your mouth is. Rohini Anand of Sodexo noted that her company uses a diversity scorecard, and how a particular unit or division performs on diversity will affect an executive’s compensation. For some execs, as much as 15 percent of their bonus can be tied to diversity-related metrics. Executives will take D&I issues much more seriously when they know that part of their paycheck depends on it.

4. Strengthen formal training programs on diversity issues.

Training is not a panacea to D&I problems, of course, but it can help — especially when it comes to helping well-intentioned people became part of the solution rather than the problem.

Pat Gillette gave this example: a well-intentioned, white male partner, worried about hurting the feelings of a minority woman associate, doesn’t give her candid feedback on an assignment that she doesn’t complete perfectly; instead, he thanks her for her work product and doesn’t work with her again (which is, as columnist Mark Herrmann has explained, a pretty common approach to Biglaw talent management). This partner thinks he’s being nice, but he’s actually doing the associate a disservice; it would be better for him to give her honest feedback so she can improve. This is the type of situation that can be avoided through proper training.

Another problem that can be remedied, at least in part, through training: implicit bias, which Paulette Brown referred to as “the silent killer of diversity in the legal profession.” To see one example of a training video on implicit bias, Brown directed the audience to the webpage of the ABA’s new Diversity & Inclusion 360 Commission.

Despite the challenges, Paulette Brown described herself as a “glass half-full kind of person” when it comes to diversity and inclusion. If we work together and work hard enough, she said, “we can bring about prosperity and justice for all.”

Thanks to Big Law Business and Bloomberg BNA for hosting an afternoon of thought-provoking conversations. If you’re interested in law firm diversity, please keep up with our ongoing coverage of this important issue, including the weekly column of Renwei Chung each Friday.

Big Law Business: Diversity and Inclusion [Big Law Business]

Earlier: Implicit Bias: The Silent Killer Of Diversity In The Legal Profession

David Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@abovethelaw.com.

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