The legal practice is both a profession and a business.
And diversity makes business sense, David Wilkins of Harvard Law School said at a Diversity Awareness Partnership event in St. Louis last week.
Wilkins is the Lester Kissel professor of law, vice dean for global initiatives on the legal profession, and faculty director of the program on the legal profession and the Center for Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry at Harvard Law School.
Nearly every company and law firm has a diversity initiative, he said.
“When I started looking at these issues in the 1980s, I assure you that was far from the case,” Wilkins said. “We’ve made progress.”
But that progress has recently flatlined. With the economic decline, the last lawyers hired were the first fired, and that largely meant lawyers of color, he said. Fewer minorities are entering law school – stifling the future pipeline for building more diverse law firms.
On May 24, Wilkins laid out a roadmap to successful diversity partnerships to more than 300 attendees at the Diversity Awareness Partnership’s Legal Diversity Summit, hosted at AT&T’s Data Center downtown.
“Companies and law firms are moving towards a partnering model, with a premium on human capital,” Wilkins said. “Human capital is just a fancy way of saying people.”
“Law firms don’t sell widgets; they sell knowledge, experience and effort. They sell human capital and that’s all they sell.”
In the world today, diversity is both a driver and a beneficiary to this new model, Wilkins said.
Why is it a driver? Because of the increased diversity of lawyers. Fifty percent are women and 20 percent are people of color.
Besides this, companies rank diversity as an important factor in choosing legal services. In Wilkins’ research, his team interviewed a wide range of companies to find out what was important to corporations when deciding on legal services.
The top answers were not surprising, he said. They included factors such as the results on similar cases, reputation, and prior relationship with the law firm.
Yet diversity was in the second tier, and it ranked up there with factors such as the size of the law firm. It rated higher than where the law firm has offices.
“Diversity is a solidly second-order factor,” he said.
St. Louis: below average
Jeffrey E. Lewis, general attorney & associate general counsel at AT&T, noted that St. Louis is making progress towards diversity in the legal profession, “but our community still ranks below many other cities in terms of the percentage of women and minorities as partners in major law firms.”
Lewis said African Americans and Hispanics are particularly underrepresented in the St. Louis partnership ranks. While women partners fare better, they are still below national averages. “The diversity of the city of St. Louis is not reflected in the city’s law firms,” said Lewis.
“But I believe that these metrics will improve as the St. Louis legal community is coming together in working to improve diversity in both corporate law departments and law firms.”
Women and diversity
Researchers also asked the question: if companies have more women in their senior leadership, are they more likely to value diversity?
“If you had 10 percent, you were twice more likely to value diversity than a company that had none,” Wilkins said. “If 50 percent of your leadership were women, you were 16 times more likely to value diversity.”
Yet, minorities are still up against age-old stereotypes.
Wilkins explained Harvard’s “Implicit Attitude Test,” a test that measures how quickly a person makes associations. It has been taken by millions of people and designed by top psychologists.
Results show that the image of what’s good in this country is white, he said.
“We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of years re-enforcing this, and only less than 50 years trying to counteract it,” he said. “It shouldn’t be surprising that it’s hardwired in our brains, even among black people.”
What are the implications of this? When people are making quick judgments of what the value of a person is, particularly in circumstances of high stress and limited information, Wilkins said they are likely to rely on preconditioned stereotypes. And oftentimes people are unaware they have these stereotypes.
“Even people who have positive liberal views of race relations, still this shows up,” he said. “This is a powerful thing, and it is particularly powerful in law.”
Wilkins said the companies who have had the most success in creating diverse partnerships are the companies that have made diversity an unrelenting top priority.
These companies have made people accountable. They have produced successful minority partners, showing minorities in the pipeline that hard work does pay off.
“We have a deep feeling that a diverse range of people will actually produce better problem-solving by bringing more ideas to the table,” he said.
Many companies and law firms have created formal policies and signed agreements with other law firms and companies to show their commitment to diversity. But those could be just words on paper without diligent accountability, he said.
