If your goal is to promote diversity and inclusion in law firms, you need to have a plan to account for diversity with every person you hire in your firm, from lawyers to employees. Create a conscious and thoughtful hiring plan that aligns with your company`s vision and values and prioritizes diversity. This is crucial to knowing what you want, don`t want, should have, and where you can find it. When you have this plan ready, you can be consistent and guided in hiring. By supporting diversity and inclusion initiatives launched by national, state, and local bar associations, your organization can expand its diversity and inclusion reach, learn, and participate in diversity programs. In this way, you can also promote diversity in the wider legal community. While bar association programs may vary in your jurisdiction, support may include things like participating in and promoting their diversity programs, encouraging law firm lawyers to speak at events or volunteer, or financially supporting programs. Kalimah White: Yes. I really think it`s important for us to expand our personal networks in the sense that our personal lives are diverse and full of diverse people. I think it makes us better people. I think it makes us more comfortable with the people we recommend for positions.
I mean, in my professional career as an adult, I`ve never really had a job opportunity that wasn`t caused by a recommendation from someone who knew me personally. And that`s what I try to do when I`m coaching other young professionals. So if we know more people who are diverse, then of course we will be able to recommend them because we know what their work ethic is. Right? We know exactly how they behave and will behave in certain situations. Therefore, I think it is very important for us to expand our personal networks and get to know more people from different cultures and backgrounds. Then it will definitely help us recruit different people in our industry. “All the panelists are here because we support you and we are glad that you have made the decision to enter the legal profession,” Castillo said at the beginning of the discussion. “We want to make our profession more diverse than we found it. » Discover Thomson Reuters Practical Law, Your Source for Cutting-Edge Information, News and Advice In addition to providing team training to identify bias, you need to have a process in place that allows each employee to learn and learn about each employee`s brand, circumstances and personal background. This knowledge will help increase diversity and strengthen the company`s brand. When it comes to diversity and inclusion in law firms, the legal profession is struggling. This is a missed opportunity for everyone: diverse lawyers bring different opinions, diverse teams make better decisions, and a more diverse and equitable legal sector fosters more innovative and creative solutions.
Vanesa Browne: Even before I became a litigator or a law student, I was a scared political scientist – I wasn`t sure what I was going to do. I wanted to study law, but I didn`t know any lawyers. Those who appear on television all seem so different from me. They seemed to like being loud and banging their fists on the table, and that just wasn`t my personality. I had the opportunity to spend a year abroad working under a lawyer in a non-profit organization, and she helped me show me that there is room for all kinds of people in the legal profession. From there, I had the opportunity to work at a law firm in their fiduciary department, and I learned more about trusts and estates. And I learned that there is room for all kinds of people in the trust and estate profession. You can be an estate planner. You can be a fiduciary litigant and executor or, like me, a trustee. Therefore, I am very grateful to be part of such an inclusive profession. The topic of diversity and inclusion (commonly referred to as “D&I”) in law firms has been discussed at several levels in law firms for many years.
But it is not enough to create policies and programs. The reality is that the composition of the legal industry is still populated by a largely homogeneous racial and gender group. According to ABA`s latest National Avocado Population Survey, 86 percent of lawyers are white, a statistic that hasn`t changed much over the past decade. In addition, the survey revealed that only 37 per cent of lawyers were women. Diversity requires greater inclusion of factors such as race or ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual orientation or identification and age. In addition to increasing diversity internally, he added, companies have a responsibility to hold outside lawyers accountable. Sarah Moore Johnson, ACTEC Fellow: Today, we`ll briefly discuss why diversity is so important in the estate planning profession, and hear from three pioneering women about how and why they chose estate planning as a career and what we can do to encourage students and people of colour to join the estate planning industry. The American Bar Association reports that in 2020, white men and, to a lesser extent, white women will remain overrepresented in the legal profession relative to their presence in the United States.