Diverse Dividends Collective focuses on equal treatment, equal opportunity, and equal access.
Legal departments want their trusted law firms to reflect their commitment to equal opportunity and inclusion, but often lack the resources and the time to gather, analyze, and operationalize data they receive from law firms.
The Diversity Dividends Collective (DDC) standardizes the requested data, collects it on behalf of legal departments, and then presents it in a user-friendly dashboard. This allows corporate legal departments to focus their efforts on reviewing the data and engaging in meaningful conversations with their relationship partners.
Two Key Reasons DDC Remains Legal and Important Right Now:
DDC promotes equal access, equal treatment, and equal opportunity, not equal outcomes or quotas: Collecting demographic data and analyzing trends remains lawful, as long as it is handled appropriately and is not used to make hiring or staffing decisions. Data is a valuable–and legal–starting point for conversations between legal departments and their outside counsel.
DDC provides increased transparency through metrics: DDC’s metrics help assess whether high-quality opportunities are fairly distributed without discrimination based on lawyers’ skill sets, seniority, and professional goals—regardless of their identity. Both legal departments and law firms have access to their own specific data and dashboards. When there is clear visibility into how opportunities are distributed—free from hidden bias or opaque practices—it can help organizations better align with legal standards and ensure equal access, equal treatment, and equal opportunity. These are all key components for satisfying the ongoing nondiscrimination requirements under laws like Title VII, the ADA, etc.
Additional Note: The Diversity Dividends Collective does not encourage or require law departments or law firms to make staffing decisions based on traits protected by law. Rather, the Collective leverages the power of data to educate the legal profession on existing diversity and identify opportunities where inclusivity may be improved. Law departments and law firms are encouraged to use the Diversity Dividends Collective in tandem with other inclusivity tools and programs and are advised to seek legal counsel before implementing any actions or changes.
response rate from law firms.
outside counsel teams have been positively impacted.
legal departments have connected with 300+ law firms.
The Diversity Dividends Collective is an award-winning consortium of legal departments working together with Diversity Lab to standardize how the legal profession measures, evaluates, and drives the inclusion efforts of outside counsel teams.
The Collective generates five main dividends for legal departments and the legal profession:
Diversity Lab minimizes the legal department resources needed to analyze outside counsel diversity efforts by helping with data collection, analytics, and resources, and providing access to the Diversity Dividends Dashboard that evaluates each legal department’s top 20 firms.
Participating legal departments are asked to:
Ask their top 20 participating law firms to complete the Annual Outside Counsel Evaluation each year.
Step 1
As part of the evaluation, participating law firms are asked to complete the Inclusion Blueprint every other year.
Step 2
Engage in follow-up conversations with their top law firms, leveraging various resources provided by Diversity Lab, including a customized Dashboard, as seen below:
Step 3
Participate in quarterly community calls with fellow legal department members.
Step 4
In its second year, 620+ client teams from more than 320 law firms received Diversity Dividends evaluations, including:
