GC leading the charge to improve diversity within the legal profession

November 28, 2015

Janvi Patel

Sharon Barner is brilliantly taking the diversity challenge to the next stage. Not only is she ensuring there is diversity within her team, but via the procurement process and a series of ongoing checks she is ensuring her external legal team mirror her internal diversity. It is also the system of checks that will ensure the diversity is sustained.GCs, as consumers are enforcing change within the legal process: changes to structure, operation and pricing have been heavily demanded and championed by GCs. They are clearly now taking on the diversity challenge within the legal market, which is still awful. We now need law firms to think of fundamental changes to ensure they attract and retain such diverse talent.

Another thing we do is track the number of hours that diverse lawyers are spending on our matters, and we track the consistency and repeatability of those lawyers on our matters. We evaluate our currents every six months on that and a number of other factors. That has allowed us to ensure an emphasis, where we are at about 50% of the hours being worked on our matters are by diverse lawyers and women.

https://bol.bna.com/cummins-gc-to-firms-treat-diverse-lawyers-well-or-ill-steal-them/