Diversity
Top Lawyers to Consider Diversity Initiatives at Upcoming Summit
Posted Mar 21, 2008, 12:12 pm CDT
By Debra Cassens Weiss
More than 100 general counsel and law firm managing partners plan to focus on specifics when they meet next month in Arizona on improving diversity in the profession.
The conference, the Call to Action Summit, will be the second major national meeting designed to prod the profession to increase hiring of women and minorities, the National Law Journal reports. The first was held about a decade ago and was sponsored by the ABA.
“The goal is to have a collaborative discussion between the general counsels and the managing partners about what we can do to move the needle on this issue," said Roderick Palmore, the general counsel and executive vice president at General Mills.
Palmore drafted a “Call to Action” letter in 2004 that calls on general counsel to pledge to give more business to diverse firms and freeze out firms that aren’t making progress, the ABA Journal reported in March 2005.
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Posted by R - 3 months, 1 week, 5 days, 15 hours, 56 minutes ago
Corporations and law firms talk about diversity—but they seem incapable of actually achieving it.
Women have made up between a third to a half of the graduating classes from law schools, yet there isn’t a major corporation or law firm where women make up 50% of the assistant GC’s or partnerships.
How can that possibly be true if companies and law firms were really trying to diversify? If they could fail that miserably at diversifying, how can they survive as a competent law firm?
The real problem is the same as it was 40 years ago—both the corporate law departments and the major law firms are run by white males. And they hire other white males—both in house and as outside counsel.
Nothing will change until corporations get serious about diversity and then force their outside counsel to do so as well.
Meanwhile, I will place my bet on another 30 years of talking about diversity without any real progress.