We recently brought together an all-star group of DEI champions to explore the topic of diversity in recruiting. Here are highlights of the in-depth conversation with Lisa Lee, VP of Global Culture & Belonging, DoorDash; John Lewis, Jr., Houston Office Managing Partner; Chair, Firmwide Diversity & Inclusion Initiatives, Shook, Hardy & Bacon LLP; and Mark Zemelman, SVP & General Counsel, Kaiser Permanente, led by David M. Dixon, Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, and Corporate Social Responsibility, Major, Lindsey & Africa.
David Dixon: While we’ve made efforts to improve diversity in the legal profession, when we look at the numbers, the profession hasn’t gained much ground over the years. Beyond increasing the student pipeline, what are the biggest challenges you’ve experienced with recruiting attorneys of color, women attorneys, and attorneys from the LGBTQ+ community?
John Lewis: The problem with the pipeline is one that has vexed our profession for a long time. Those who are in the talent business in law firms know that there are challenges associated with meeting increasing client demands for a more diverse workforce. When I was in-house, we wanted teams of lawyers who reflected our consumer base and looked like the world of people to whom we target our business.
But there are a few challenges. The first is an increasingly diminishing pool of students who are steered to law school. I started law school in 1987 and finished in 1990. I’m sad that the population in absolute numbers of Black men in law school is smaller today than it was then. A lot of things account for that; certainly, fewer Black men and Latino men are going to college. Because fewer people are going to college, we’ve got fewer people who go to law school. We compete with the pool of top students who may choose to go into business, to go into other professions, or to become entrepreneurs.
We’ve also got to reexamine our notions of who is qualified or who can potentially become successful in the legal profession. We have looked at certain schools and focused on certain kinds of credentials. As lawyers, what we promise to our clients is that we think out of the box and that we’re able to solve complex problems. I’m sure as a profession we will figure this out, but it will require us to think differently than we’ve thought in the past.
Mark Zemelman: The problem is more of the will to fix the problem. If people decide they want to fix the problem, then they can fix the problem. I don’t see a pipeline issue; it can be very much managed.
Harvard Business Review ran an article a couple of years ago asking what you are looking for lawyers for. You want lawyers who can think about the most difficult topics, stay calm, address those topics thoughtfully, bring in lots of different points of view, and come up with solutions. And there is no more complex issue in United States than race—never has been. The thing that we have done in our department is, instead of burying the issue, we just brought it out.
We are constantly running programs, dealing with each of our backgrounds, how we bring what experiences we have in and how we engage around difficult issues, particularly around issues of race, gender, etc. As a result, we’ve got people who can deal with uncomfortable conversations. And that plays out in the rest of their lives. That plays out in their ability to be fantastic lawyers taking on the most sensitive, emotional, difficult subjects and being able to work with those. So, I suspect that that’s why the department is just so good, and at the same time, the most diverse it’s ever been.
How do you do that from a recruiting standpoint? It’s really a matter of just saying, we’re not going to accept anything else except the absolute best talent that can be pulled. And that means that we’re going to have diverse panels of candidates. You can’t take out half the population and think that you’re going to get the best candidates.
We don’t accept anything less than a full-scale diversity search. And that means that we’re searching the country, and we’re searching for six months if we must—that’s just what you must do. If one is clear on what your objective is, it gets done. You end up with a diverse department of the absolute top people in the field, which is what we have now. In fact, diversity has become its own attraction now.
Point number two is that, as part of that search, you need to make sure that you’re not limiting yourself. For instance, I had this situation where we were looking for a labor and employment lawyer and we were not getting a panel of diverse candidates. It turns out that one of the criteria was that the candidate be located in California, and I asked why that was the case. The response was, “Because 85% of Kaiser’s business is in California, so we must have somebody with that background.” I said, “If one of the people on the NLRB in Washington, D.C., wants to come to Kaiser, you’re saying they can’t come?” We agreed that of course we would take someone with that experience, which proved that the California qualification didn’t apply. So, we took that out. We then did a national search and ended up with a fabulous African-American woman who’s turned out to be one of the most brilliant people in the department. That’s what you must do. It’s always a question of why we aren’t getting diversity. Because it’s out there.
David: No industry or profession has solved the problem, but it seems like the corporate world, in some ways, is ahead of the legal profession. Do you feel the corporate world and legal profession face the same challenges?
Lisa Lee: I’ll start by saying that it’s a low bar for all of us, and it’s tough to look at different industries and compare ourselves because of that low bar. It requires all of us to think differently about the future so that we can really break out of the “We’re just slightly better than them and, therefore, we’re doing OK” mindset.
While the numbers may look slightly better in the corporate world, I do think that we face similar challenges. Human beings are biased, and we make snap judgments and put people in boxes. Sometimes it’s simply because we must make decisions quickly, so we use indicators to tell us how we can get to a decision faster.
All of us are doing a thousand things every day, and when we have a pile of resumes come in, we look for shortcuts to help our brain process information. Recruiting practices are very similar across the board, and depending on the culture of your company and your industry, we see additional challenges on top of that.
For example, tech can be a place where it’s very hyper growth. We’re adding hundreds of new employees on a weekly/biweekly basis. So, it’s like you can’t recruit fast enough. Therefore, the snap judgment is a bit more severe because you’re trying to get to that fast outcome. If you’re coming from the Ubers and Facebooks of the world, therefore, our snap judgment tells us that you know how to thrive in a tech environment, when that is not necessarily true. One of my mentors said this line that I love, which is that Harvard is not a skill set; it’s a school.
John: Having spent half my career in a company and half in a law firm, I know the reality is that companies, though not perfect, reflect a mindset that is not lawyer based. You see the entire ecosystem of finance people, marketing people, and science people. And what we see is that for some reason, we’ve imposed these artificial strictures that are intended to sub-segment us in terms of talent.
I do not know where my doctor went to school, nor do I know where the guy who does my taxes finished in school. I don’t know where the engineer and the architect who designed my house or a building went to school, but we focus so intently on these things as gatekeepers of a profession that we exclude people who we later learn are actually pretty good.
We understand what makes successful lawyers. We know, as we observe them out in the world, that some of them are highly pedigreed and gentrified and come from great lawyer families and all of that. It was a kid in my law school who explained to me what a trust was because he was getting a check every month, when I couldn’t as a first-generation law student conceptualize what it was.
But a lot of us exhibit the characteristics that we know inform success generally—ability to deal with adversity, creativity, charisma and executive presence, tenacity and emotional intelligence—things that no particular school and no particular arena have the market cornered on. The credentials are important, but left unchecked, I think that they lead us down a path of intellectual laziness because rather than interrogate the specific attributes or qualities of a person, we begin to “bucketize” people and take the shortcuts that allow us to take pedigree, portfolio, and affluence as surrogates for capacity to be successful.
David: How does the pressure clients put on law firms play out in the drive for change?
Mark: The truth of it is, we have found over the years that our legal spend is enough to drive medium-sized firms and really compel them to become more diverse. We’ve had trouble with the biggest firms. Our spend is nothing close to that of a Microsoft or that kind of organization, so we don’t carry the same dollar weight when it comes to the biggest firms.
Because of that, I decided to put money behind moving our business out to minority and women-owned firms. And that meant tying a substantial portion to the bonus our lawyers get at the end of the year. That first year we went from, on average, spending about 5% to spending 30%. Every year since then, we have been at least at 20%.
That has been the single most effective program that we’ve had. It’s effective not just in terms of having lawyers who look like us when they’re out there representing us, meaning they look like the community, but in that we’re getting better rates and better responsiveness. It’s just been a win-win-win in terms of quality and cost as well as diversity.
David: George Floyd and the numerous murders by police that we experienced in 2020 and the increase in hate crimes sparked a racial and social justice movement over the past two years. The pandemic also forced changes in how we live and work, prompting “the great resignation,” as it’s been called. What opportunities has this combination created for improving diversity and recruiting?
Lisa: I think that the things that have happened in the past two years have really spurred what I have observed as “the great realization” versus “the great resignation.” I’m certainly not the first person to call it that, but that resonates a lot more with me than “the great resignation” because it’s not that people don’t want to work anymore. That would be an oversimplification in how we’re thinking about our employees’ needs and wants. It’s more of a shift in dynamic of what people are expecting out of their employers and the kind of life that they really want to live, which is one that has meaning and impact and one where they feel like they can be more authentically themselves.
In many ways, I am appreciative of employees now having a different kind of expectation and having demands about the kind of place that they truly want to work in because what it’s going to do is push us to truly think about what employee centricity looks like. How do we run a business that is responsible, caring, and compassionate, that puts people at the center of it? Without our employees, our businesses don’t run. So, while it’s been painful for me as a leader to experience that huge shift in the past two years, I also think that it’s going to push our industries to be better.
There are benefits of what we have seen from COVID that we just never thought were going to be possible. We never thought that we would have this “pause” for us to evaluate our lives, the way that we’ve been working and the ways in which we’ve been supporting our companies. I don’t want that to go away.
I’m nervous, though, that we’re going to go right back to the way that we worked before. I’ll really caution against that, because the fact is, we have seen when we are not hindered by ZIP codes that we’ve been able to hire faster. We’ve been able to hire amazing colleagues and it has allowed us to explore different business opportunities that we would not have been so quick to come upon by ourselves.
Now, obviously, this is not one-size-fits-all, but I would encourage all leaders to really reflect deeply about the biases that they hold that prevent them from being able to think about innovation. If you have felt, “Nope, we absolutely need to get everybody back to the office two to three times a week,” write down the reasons why. Then ask yourself this: “Is this a data point of one, because it’s been my experience, and therefore, I believe that it’s the projection of other people’s experiences?” Because instead it needs to be, “What is the data telling us?” Data is telling us that women caregivers and underrepresented people of color have really benefited in terms of their overall engagement, their productivity, and their happiness when they have been able to have control over their schedule and the way that they want to show up at work. So, don’t lose sight of that.
Watch the full on-demand webinar now:
Back To Main Blog
