Corporate Clients Want Diversity at Their Law Firms
from
July/August 2007
by Dan Kaplan
The National Association for Law Placement—one of the most influential watchdogs of the legal world—reported in 1993 that among major law firms, the average partnership was about 97% white and 88% male. Over the following six years, the annual decreases in those statistics were measured in fractions of a percent. Charles Morgan, then the executive vice president and general counsel of BellSouth, was not impressed. In 1999 he published a document titled “Diversity in the Workplace: A Statement of Principle,” which declared that in principle, a diverse legal world is better than one that is almost entirely white and male. More than 500 companies were quick to sign it.
The law firms scrambled. Meetings on improving diversity were held, diversity committees formed, mission statements amended. Some firms, like Shearman & Sterling, even created a full-time position dedicated to addressing the issue—a job now held there by Anna L. Brown, a lawyer for 17 years whose title is special attorney and director of diversity. Her role, she says, is “to work with firm management and the diversity committee to assist the firm in establishing and implementing its diversity strategies.”
Despite these initiatives, between 2000 and 2004 the percentage of women and minority partners in major law firms rose only by approximately 1.4 and 1 percentage points, respectively. Like Charles Morgan before him, Rick Palmore, Sara Lee’s chief legal officer, was not impressed.
In his view, the “Statement of Principle” had brought about some change, but its traction had expired. Palmore, who’s now 55, decided that if companies truly wanted the gender and racial proportions within major law firms to change, someone had to draw a line in the sand and mount machine guns behind it. So in 2004 he wrote the “Call to Action,” which was sent to many of the Fortune 500 general counsel and posted on a website, www.clocalltoaction.com. It paid homage to the principles of its predecessor, but added a pledge to increase diversity within company legal departments and to demand it from the law firms they engage. Over the next two years, the chief legal officers of about 90 major corporations—including Accenture, Boeing, General Motors, Intel, Sara Lee, Shell Oil, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart—signed on.
Weil Gotshal & Manges’s Holly Loiseau, 37, says that many of her firm’s major clients (she won’t say which) are now making more demands regarding the gender and racial breakdown of the legal teams handling their business. In one typical instance, a partner overseeing the client’s account—the relationship partner—sat down with the client’s general counsel, who discussed the company’s commitment to diversity. The client company then sent a survey to Weil Gotshal’s director of diversity with questions about the demographics of the law firm’s 253 U.S. partners, the steps the firm was taking to promote diversity among employees, and the gender and ethnicity of the lawyers handling the company’s account.
The answers Weil Gotshal has provided to that company and others seeking similar data have generally resulted in “very positive” responses, says Loiseau. She admits, though, that many clients would like to see more women and minorities make it to partner.
Weil Gotshal is getting there. Last year, out of 20 newly promoted partners, 11 were women, which marked the first time in the firm’s history that women have outnumbered men. The promotions brought the number of female partners in the firm’s U.S. offices to 55 out of 253, or 21.7%—approximately seven percentage points above the national average for major firms. Weil Gotshal says it has five black partners in the U.S., two of them male. Its diversity committee has 19 members, including 13 women and six minorities.
Perhaps the strongest pressure for diversity has come from DuPont, Sara Lee, and Shell Oil—and, more recently, the consulting firm Accenture. Accenture last year sent a seven-page questionnaire to 40 firms that handled the bulk of its legal work. The questions were intended to develop a picture of the firms’ diversity practices that would “set a baseline to measure progress over time,” says Accenture’s chief general counsel, Doug Scrivner, 56. Among other things, Accenture asked for details of firms’ diversity initiatives, including how frequently the diversity committee convened and who showed up when it did. Accenture said it regarded the survey’s completion as a sign of the diversity commitment it expected from law firms. All but one firm complied. Accenture terminated the holdout.
Now Accenture has put out a second survey to check progress. “If we believe that a law firm is not taking diversity seriously, or taking steps backwards, this will have an impact on our use of that firm,” Scrivner says.
More than 30 general counsel who had signed the “Call to Action” gathered in New York City last November during the seventh annual “Creating Pathways to Diversity” conference hosted by the Minority Corporate Counsel Association. They estimated that their companies’ outlays to law firms totaled more than $2 billion annually. On behalf of diversity, they agreed to find ways to push around all that weight.
