Late in the last decade, the idea of bringing greater diversity and inclusion to corporate legal departments and to the outside law firms that serviced them was on the verge of becoming a real movement that would shake up and shake up the legal industry in the years to come.
What happened to that movement? 2008 happened.
The Great Recession threw companies, and the legal departments and law firms serving them, into survival mode. One of the casualties of all that tumult was the diversity movement, as legal departments now had other issues to focus on.
One of the factors that contributed to that retreat? At the time, implementing diversity and inclusion initiatives and measuring any progress being made was a highly manual process, requiring law firms to be willing to share business information and documentation, some of it perhaps confidential in their minds, with client legal departments.
Perhaps more importantly, there was also no standard yet set for diversity and inclusion; what, exactly, were the thresholds everyone would be measured against? Establishing these was a critical first step that was set aside as corporate America set itself to righting the ship after the economy’s trip to the financial brink.
Diversity is back despite (or because of?) COVID-19
Among the pressures making legal diversity more of a front-burner concern than ever? Anyone who’s looked at the news over the past two years has seen the societal and media pressures in action, from #metoo to BLM. Companies want to be seen as diverse and inclusive, and the fact that federal and state regulations mandate diversity from contractors is no small influence, either.
Even when companies have had the best of intentions, there are a number of reasons why diversity programs fail, as the Harvard Business Review once explained. There are reasons they succeed, too, largely stemming from an organizational commitment to building a greater sense of social accountability into their culture, doing outreach to educational institutions to find apt candidates, and more.
When the coronavirus pandemic struck, it would seem like an obvious excuse to set diversity initiatives aside once again, just like 2008. But in our own experience and that of notable experts like David Cunningham, founder of Legal Metrics and CIO of Winston & Strawn LLC, very nearly the opposite happened: “The focus on diversity is louder than it was a year ago,” he says.
The number of law firms joining diversity-focused initiatives and of legal departments implementing internal and external diversity metrics programs has been “far higher” than in 2019, David says. That’s in spite of the pandemic. Why?
The need to do more with less, to become more productive and efficient, has driven the rise of Legal Operations and the adoption of technology solutions by legal departments. As those departments are pressed into making significant changes in how they operate and measure success, among the beneficiaries have been diversity and inclusion efforts.
Data is driving diversity
These firms find themselves sitting atop copious amounts of data. They had data in the past, mind you; the problem was in being able to effectively collate and analyze data that was buried in spreadsheets across the organization, sifting it in a way that generated actionable insights.
By adopting enterprise legal management, e-Billing, matter management, process automation, and other technologies in pursuit of greater productivity and reduced costs? Legal departments have come to see they can crunch those same numbers to score diversity performance on the part of outside counsel.
Those new technologies have become even more attractive to legal departments and their outside counsel/vendor ecosystems in 2020, thanks to the pandemic and the swift pivot to remote staffing environments. By installing these tools, they’re gaining agility and much-needed resilience, yet they’re able to better monitor diversity compliance at the same time. There isn’t the need to solicit additional documentation from law firms to prove diversity if you can simply analyze the data pools you already have on hand. This also solves the problem of “survey fatigue,” as they don’t need to repeatedly fill out diversity audits.
Thanks to efforts of leaders like David Cunningham and others, there’s more likelihood the legal industry will settle upon standardized diversity and inclusion metrics and KPIs, too. So everyone involved will be able to work together that much more harmoniously in changing the face of the legal industry…figuratively and literally.
Steven O’Donnell is Mitratech’s Head of Product Marketing for Legal Operations. Steven originally came from Progressive Insurance where he spent 15 years as a product and market analyst. Steven joined Mitratech in 2011 and leads the company efforts around creating content for legal operations. A frequent speaker at Mitratech events, Steven spends considerable time researching the market and technology trends to understand how Mitratech’s products can address legal department challenges.
