Resources

The new strategic plan for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is eliminating barriers to employment.

Six ideas that could help organizations improve hiring, performance, equity, and more.

While anonymous hiring is generally effective, there are situations where it can fail to help you diversify your candidate pool.

Going through life masking to fit in can be exhausting and lead to burn out. Learning to believe the way you are is the right way to be can unlock your power and potential. Courtney Munnings, Diversity Lab’s Mansfield Rule and Knowledge Sharing Specialist, successfully navigated law school and big law firm life prior to […]

Focus your DEI program on interrupting the bias that’s constantly transmitted through basic business systems. It’s the most effective approach to building an inclusive environment and controlling for legal risk.

While the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to end race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions was not unexpected, it nonetheless appears to have given enlightened leaders in the legal and broader business community reason for pause, if not panic. It shouldn’t.

After the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, leaders might be concerned that their DEI initiatives will face additional scrutiny and legal challenges. While reducing liability is a responsible move, don’t succumb to a fear-driven abandonment of effective DEI practices.

Partners from Seyfarth share their insights on the recent SCOTUS affirmative action decisions and how organizations can continue with DEI efforts in the current climate.

An interview with Caren Ulrich Stacy, founder and CEO of Diversity Lab, and Alyssa Jarvis, senior Mansfield manager, explores the behavioral approach to driving change in the legal industry.

About 70 midsize firms qualified for Diversity Lab’s midsize Mansfield Certification in the program’s second iteration. Leaders at recently qualified firms said the program pushed them to formalize talent management solutions.

Despite some progress, the legal profession continues to struggle with diversity and inclusion.

In collaboration with Diversity Lab, Nixon Peabody designed the “Mansfield Rule for Workflow” (MRW), a “bias interrupter” to help the firm’s leaders create a more inclusive culture related to staffing teams and furthering associates’ career development.

An interview with Caren Ulrich Stacy, the founder and CEO of the Diversity Lab, about how behavioral science and design thinking can cultivate diversity and inclusion in legal organizations.

Built-in structural issues can cause relatively diversified annual junior intakes to experience alarming dropout rates further down the line.

Researchers from two universities say data science backs the need for DEIA innovation and measurement, leveraging Mansfield as a prime example. Finding that Mansfield early-adopter firms roughly double the rate at which gender and racial representation is improving in their firm’s equity partnerships and executive committees.

Former Reed Smith DEI leader John Iino, Penn Law’s Jim Sandman, and Diversity Lab CEO Caren Ulrich Stacy share data on Mansfield’s promising progress in delivering positive culture and structural changes in law firm leadership.

In its efforts to help women lawyers reenter the profession, Diversity Lab’s OnRamp Fellowship addresses the intersectionality of gender, age, and ethnicity or race for women’s representation in the law.

With more than 240 participating law firms this year, the legal profession now has the data needed to measure inclusion – in addition to representation – of underrepresented lawyers on a large scale for the first time. Diversity Lab encourages firms to use this data to prioritize their inclusion efforts.

The Diversity Dividends Collective is a first-of-its-kind collective amongst more than 40 legal departments to propel the inclusion, equity, and diversity of legal departments’ outside counsel teams—broadening the scope of underrepresented lawyers at law firms who have access to high-quality work, regularly interact with in-house counsel, and receive credit for originating client work.

Employing and including people with disabilities can provide companies with a competitive advantage.

An essential read from David Cross, Partner at MoFo and a member of the Diversity Lab Disability Advisory Council. David shares his experience as a lawyer with a disability, the negative stigmas still surrounding people with disabilities, and how law firms can break down barriers for people with disabilities.

This article defines and explains the different types of neurodiversity, and why it makes sense for organizations to embrace neurodiversity in the workplace.

Mark Wasserman talks about Eversheds Sutherland’s approach to succession planning, which goes beyond traditional retirement and focuses on all the people in the firm having access to opportunities at all points in their careers.

In June 2018, Harvard Law School Executive Education hosted the first Diversity in Law Hackathon run by Diversity Lab and sponsored by Bloomberg Law. Read about the event: A Hackathon to Promote Diversity in Law, Harvard Law Today

Diversity Lab is providing law firms with the Inclusion Blueprint Strategic Planning Guide as a north star for assessing their firm’s current inclusion efforts.

The legal profession has room to grow on inclusion tracking and measuring opportunities for lawyers with disabilities.

Within each practice group category, more practice groups show year-over-year representation increases for equity partners than for non-equity partners across most demographic groups.

Leveraging this Guide, practice group leaders can clearly identify what their practice group is already doing to ensure inclusivity and what their practice group can do to enhance its efforts to be more inclusive so that all lawyers have fair and equal access to career advancement.

This Guide helps firm leaders identify what they are already doing to promote inclusivity  and what else they can do to ensure that all lawyers have fair and equal access to career advancement and success.

The 2019 Inclusion Blueprint reveals many interesting insights regarding the inclusion practices and diversity representation at both the practice group and firmwide levels at more than 70 law firms, which mostly include midsize to large Am Law 200 firms.

This analysis examines data collected from the ChIPs Inclusion Blueprint Survey, conducted in August 2018, in partnership with Diversity Lab regarding gender diversity, inclusion practices, and intellectual property group inclusion practices.

The first of our four-part series about how organizations can support individuals with disabilities, this Knowledge Sharing webinar focuses on language, definitions, and self-identification.

The first of our four-part series about how organizations can support individuals with disabilities, this Knowledge Sharing webinar focuses on language, definitions, and self-identification.

The first of our four-part series about how organizations can support individuals with disabilities, this Knowledge Sharing webinar focuses on language, definitions, and self-identification.

Summary Systemic Problem: Industry data shows that leadership in law firms and legal departments does not reflect the diversity of the workforce or society.  Since lawyers often have an immense societal footprint – often branching out from leadership in private practice and companies to take on roles where their decisions reverberate massively across the public and […]

US & Canada Legal Departments (November 2022) “At Accenture we know that our commitment to inclusion, diversity and equality unleashes innovation, and underpins a culture in which everyone feels they have an equal opportunity to feel they belong, advance and thrive. We share in Diversity Lab’s mission and embrace the Mansfield Rule’s focus on accountability […]

US & Canada Law Firms (October 2022) “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) are core values of Beveridge & Diamond. We are dedicated to continuing our leadership in DE&I and fostering an inclusive workplace for lawyers and staff alike. Our participation in the Mansfield Rule initiative has facilitated our development of new programs and processes, and […]

Panelists: Laura Greenspan, Director, US Litigation & Investigations and Legal Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Lead at Astellas Pharma US, Raegan Henderson, Director of Culture, Inclusion, and Diversity at Dorsey & Whitney, Emmi Mäkiharju, Senior Inclusion and Diversity Manager at BCLP (UK)

Panelists: Laura Greenspan, Director, US Litigation & Investigations and Legal Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Lead at Astellas Pharma US, Raegan Henderson, Director of Culture, Inclusion, and Diversity at Dorsey & Whitney, Emmi Mäkiharju, Senior Inclusion and Diversity Manager at BCLP (UK)

Panelists: Laura Greenspan, Director, US Litigation & Investigations and Legal Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Lead at Astellas Pharma US, Raegan Henderson, Director of Culture, Inclusion, and Diversity at Dorsey & Whitney, Emmi Mäkiharju, Senior Inclusion and Diversity Manager at BCLP (UK)