Law Firms Head Back To School For Diversity Guidance
Law360, New York (August 21, 2017, 8:04 PM EDT) — Frustrated by a lack of progress on diversity, some law firms are starting to take a more academic approach.
Goodwin Procter LLP and Dickinson Wright PLLC are among a handful of firms that are turning to universities to study their workplace policies in action. By putting themselves under the microscope, they’re hoping to root out structural inequalities or implicit biases that may be holding them back from building a more diverse workforce.
“Many law firms, but also companies, have tried other things before. They’ve done mentorship, affinity networks and more traditional diversity training programs,” said Iris Bohnet, the director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. “They’re not moving the needle enough. That’s why unconscious bias now is so prominent.”
Bohnet, a behavioral economist, has been working one-on-one with Goodwin. She’s been studying the international law firm’s practices for months to identify areas where unconscious bias may be hindering its efforts to create a more inclusive work environment.
The study will ultimately lead to a tailored series of “diversity nudges” — policies and practices meant to curb the detrimental effects of bias by addressing them before they happen.
Meanwhile, Dickinson Wright has engaged the University of Michigan to examine its practices, and professors at Stanford Law School are exploring how other law firms might be able to apply so-called design thinking to diversity.
According to academics, getting a candid accounting of how a law firm is faring on bias and inclusiveness is a step that can put it on a path toward meaningful change.
In a research paper to be published in the forthcoming Indiana Law Journal, Seattle University School of Law professor Brooke Coleman writes that the first step for law firms seeking to improve diversity is simple: admitting there is an issue by creating awareness.
“Adopting that approach opens the door to structural changes that might actually work,” she wrote. “For example, once a firm can openly discuss bias and how it impacts one’s ability to succeed, it can create programs to educate individuals — especially those in leadership roles — on how bias functions.”
‘Changing Systems’
At Goodwin, the effort to eliminate implicit bias involves an in-depth examination of how decisionmaking throughout the firm may be affected by biased thinking.
One way the law firm has looked at bias is through experimentation with structured interviews. Goodwin has been piloting the interview method in its Washington, D.C., office over the past several months.
In a structured interview, an interviewer gives a set of candidates the same queries — such as “Tell me about a time when you demonstrated leadership” — in the same order, and then the interviewer evaluates each of their responses.
According to Bohnet, the Harvard professor working on the Goodwin study, the practice eliminates much of the “noise” that can cloud the judgment of hiring managers in an unstructured interview filled with conversation about interests the interviewer and interviewee may share, like hobbies or sports teams.
Bohnet and firm leaders are also looking at performance reviews and advancement opportunities at Goodwin.
“We decided to take on, as part of our diversity and inclusion work, a way to tackle and mitigate unconscious bias at all those important inflection points,” said Deborah Birnbach, who is the co-chair of Goodwin’s women’s initiative and a member of its inclusion advisory committee.
These efforts began about three years ago, with a campaign to raise awareness inside the law firm on matters of diversity and implicit bias. This was followed by reviews of the law firm’s hiring committee, attorney review committee, partnership committee and allocations committee, which all focused on the potential for implicit bias to enter decisionmaking.
Finally, the law firm brought on Bohnet to look at ways it can redesign processes and introduce interventions to reduce the effects of bias.
That final process has involved, among other things, the introduction of structured interviews, working through the firm’s performance review forms to examine whether the questions pertain strictly to objective information about lawyers’ performance at the firm, and introducing “bias interrupters” into important meetings, such as performance evaluations.
A bias interrupter would be a director of diversity or a chief human resources officer who sits in the room during an evaluation or compensation meeting, serving as a watchdog to flag anything that is a cause for concern when it comes to diversity.
As to potentially biased questions on performance review forms, the law firm learned that instead of asking an open-ended question about an individual’s strengths — which is what it had been doing — it is preferable to ask for two to three specific examples of the strengths in action.
According to Laura Acosta, Goodwin’s managing director of professional development and training, asking for specific examples helps avoid bias that researchers have observed in the field. For example, women tend to be judged on past performance and men tend to be judged on potential.
“Goodwin has taken this to the next level not only in changing minds, but in changing systems,” Bohnet said. “If you take bias out of the system, then we level the playing field and we can be true to our culture, which is a meritocracy.”
‘The Courage to Test Ourselves’
Through a partnership with the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, Dickinson Wright recently completed what’s known as a multidisciplinary action project to help promote the professional growth and retention of women and minorities.
A group of business school students, with the guidance of a professor, spent a semester taking an intense look at the law firm’s policies and practices. At the end of the period, they offered their suggestions for how the firm can improve, issuing a more than 100-page report in May.
The research process included a review of the law firm’s policies and procedures related to diversity, interviews with attorneys about their experiences, and an extensive review of publications regarding the legal industry.
“I think the biggest benefit was that it was a very no-nonsense diagnostic tool,” said Katheryne Zelenock, a member at Dickinson Wright in charge of the project. “We were very candid with them, and we got very candid feedback.”
The students recommended changing the law firm’s leave policy to clarify that parental leave applies to both men and women, and that the firm broaden the number of people to whom sexual harassment can be reported.
They also suggested that the firm create a parents affinity group in addition to its other affinity groups — all things the law firm is now working to implement.
In addition, the students said the firm should give its diversity committee and women’s network a greater voice in policymaking and expand its recently formed minority attorneys affinity group.
As a result, Zelenock says, the law firm has begun recruiting more attorneys to participate in the minority attorney group by publicizing it internally.
Another resource the students were able to offer the law firm was an empirical method for measuring how often individual partners assign work to minority and female associates.
“As lawyers, we don’t think about business problems the same way business students do,” Zelenock said. “They offered us ways of looking at data and provided objective evidence on things like work allocation.”
The students also uncovered positive aspects of the law firm’s policies, including the conclusion that its compensation system is gender- and race-blind.
“A lot of firms wouldn’t have opened themselves up to such a thorough review,” Zelenock said. “We can say we had the courage to test ourselves and identified things we need to work on, and it helped us validate that there are a few things we’re doing really well on.”
‘Money and Power’
A few other law firms are in the early stages of programs that partner them with Stanford Law School.
The programs involve participating in workshops conducted by Stanford’s Legal Design Lab, which aims to develop innovations in legal services by bringing lawyers together with designers and technologists.
Lucy Ricca, executive director of the Stanford Center on the Legal Profession, is working alongside Margaret Hagan, who oversees the Legal Design Lab, to find solutions for diversity problems at law firms by using design thinking.
The design thinking process places a priority on keeping people affected by a given problem in mind when finding a solution to that problem, and it also highlights the need to empathize with those people.
In the case of law firms, the process can be used to work through diversity policies from the perspective of the people who are subject to them — and to develop prototypes of solutions that fit better with the needs of those attorneys.
Stanford is participating in an event this November with Kirkland & Ellis LLP, for example, in which the Legal Design Lab is scheduled to present a workshop on using design thinking to bring diverse attorneys more fully into the business-development process.
Design thinking can be especially useful in circumstances where conventional problem-solving has failed to yield adequate results, because the process forces people to think differently about the problems they’re trying to solve, Ricca said.
One reason law firm diversity efforts have been coming up short, she said, is that they often involve only things like affinity groups, which are “on the edges” of the problem.
“What really matters is the central ways people are evaluated, promoted and how compensation is decided. Money and power,” Ricca said. “Those structures must be interrogated and changed in ways that will really help women and minorities gain more leadership roles.”