Diversity Dividends Collective
Diversity Dividends Collective
Boosting Outside Counsel Team Diversity & Inclusion
The Diversity Dividends Collective (DDC) is an award-winning consortium of 40+ legal departments working together with Diversity Lab to standardize how the legal profession measures, evaluates, and improves the DEI performance of outside counsel teams.
This community effort resulted in the most extensive data on outside counsel team diversity ever collected and shared publicly across the legal profession. Click here to view the results via an interactive Diversity Dividends Collective Dashboard. This second year of data collection and analysis encompasses 13,667 lawyers across 620 client teams from 320 law firms.
DDC generates four main dividends for legal departments and the legal profession:
✅ Enhanced outside counsel team diversity and inclusion;
✅ Insight into who has access to high quality work, regular client interactions, lead roles, and financial credit;
✅ Legal departments holding firms accountable for increasing their DEI efforts along with other factors such as service, value, and cost; and
✅ Industry-wide coalescence and a sharper focus on the outside counsel diversity and inclusion metrics that really matter (more is not always better with data).
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.
Registration to join the Collective is open! Legal department leaders who would like to learn more, please email Valerie Portillo at valerie@diversitylab.com.
What Makes the Collective Different?
DDC is the only collection and analysis tool for outside counsel team data that:
- Reduces legal department workloads: Diversity Lab collects and analyzes the data so legal departments can focus on conversations with firms that lead to real progress. And DDC goes beyond the data to provide multiple levels of support for legal departments from start to finish — including a Knowledge Bank with communication templates, a custom interactive dashboard for each legal department, a Dashboard Review and Partnership Guide, and more — to inform and drive outside counsel conversations and progress.
- Requires relationship partner involvement: DDC is the only assessment that cannot be completed by a DEI professional or data analyst without the input of relationship partners. This is critical since relationship partners staff matters and provide access to development opportunities for lawyers on a daily basis. More than a data tool, DDC is a structural intervention meant to nudge partners toward inclusivity.
- Includes inclusion metrics: The Inclusion Blueprint is leveraged as part of the DDC data to measure firms’ inclusion practices and provide that intel to legal departments.
- Assesses regular client interaction: This is a proxy for quality work that goes beyond the numbers, in addition to asking about team makeup, relationship and matter leads, and financial credit.
- Collects aggregate team data: This approach increases firm response rates (93% for DDC!) and protects timekeeper privacy, while still producing a rich set of actionable data.
- Tracks legal departments’ commitment to follow up with their firms: Diversity Lab provides the resources, structure, and accountability to ensure legal departments follow up with their firms.
- Leverages the power of the Collective: 40+ legal departments (and growing) that share knowledge, learn from each other, and drive firm progress in mass (300+ firms, 620+ client teams, and 13,700 lawyers so far), increasing the legal departments’ economic influence beyond their own legal spend.
- Measures progress and outcomes for each legal department and the Collective as a whole: No other client supplement or e-billing tool aggregates this data across multiple legal departments for the benefit of the legal profession.
- Involves a team of DEI and data experts to support legal departments: DDC is backed and supported by Diversity Lab’s legal talent, behavioral science, and PhD data science experts (who are also really fun).
- Built with the support of lawyers and DEI experts: Leaders from both law firms and legal departments helped build this collective to maximize results and impact while also protecting timekeeper privacy.
Current Collective Legal Departments
Accenture — Alcoa Corporation — American Electric Power — Axiom Law — Bridgestone Americas — CDW — CHRISTUS Health — Con Edison — Corning — Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Inc. — Dick’s Sporting Goods — Discover Financial Services — The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company — HP Inc. — IDEXX Laboratories — Intermountain Healthcare — Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. (JLL) — M. A. Mortenson Company — Micron Technology, Inc. — MISO (Midcontinent Independent System Operator) — Moffitt Cancer Center — Petco Health and Wellness Company, Inc. — Pinterest — PNC Bank — Relativity — Saint-Gobain Corp, NA — San Francisco 49ers — St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital — State Street — Sunrun Inc. — Takeda — Tapestry, Inc. — U.S. Bank — United States Steel Corporation — Xcel Energy
Collective Outcomes
Launched in 2021, the second year (2022) DDC data collection efforts have yielded impressive results: an overall 93% completion rate for 615 survey requests across 320+ firms! Check out the results via this public, interactive DDC Dashboard to see how the diversity of DDC client teams have progressed and benchmark your own client team diversity. This is the first-ever client team data collected and shared publicly at this scale.
Collective Deep Dive
Who Should Participate?
Legal departments of all sizes, profiles of which may include:
- Legal departments with advanced/mature outside counsel diversity programs can leverage the MTN Diversity Dividends Collective to benchmark their current programs and compliance prompts, to improve and streamline their existing practices, and wield their power more effectively in the legal industry.
- Legal departments with early-stage or intermediate programs can leverage the MTN Diversity Dividends Collective to enhance, supplement, or rebuild their current efforts and ensure their legal spending power has an outsized impact on advancing the diversity of the legal profession.
- Smaller legal departments or those that do not yet have outside counsel diversity programs can join the MTN Diversity Dividends Collective for an effective and simple way to create and sustain a new and holistic program, leveraging the learnings from other companies, with minimal resources from their in-house team and maximum effectiveness from and to the greater Collective.
What are the Basic Requirements?
At a high level, the MTN Diversity Dividends Collective asks legal departments to commit to the following actions with regard to outside counsel diversity metrics:
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- Enroll a senior lawyer who will serve in an oversight role for the Diversity Dividends Collective;
- Actively participate in knowledge sharing on quarterly calls with fellow Collective members;
- Require your law firms to complete the Annual Outside Counsel Evaluation, administered by Diversity Lab, each year;
- Require your law firms to complete the Firm Leadership Assessment of the Inclusion Blueprint, administered by Diversity Lab, every other year; and
- Engage in follow up conversations with each of your law firms, using the data collected by Diversity Lab to discuss the firms’ DEI efforts.
How Do Legal Departments Benefit?
Working together as a Collective, the goal is to generate four dividends for participants and the legal profession over time:
- Increased the diversity of the teams working on client matters;
- Sharper focus and insight into who, as part of those diverse teams, is doing the high-level work and getting leadership and business credit to ensure an equitable distribution of power and economics on client teams;
- Accountability for law firms and legal departments that is transparent and consequential with legal departments moving work towards and away from law firms based on progress over time;
- Broad systemic change in the legal field through industry-wide coalescence around the granular diversity and inclusion metrics that really matter and the collective’s broad influence on 300+ law firms.
In addition, upon registration, participants receive access to a Knowledge Bank with resources needed to successfully implement Diversity Dividends, including:
- Timelines and action items for the registration year and the following year;
- Draft communications about the Collective to send to internal colleagues and outside counsel;
- FAQs to share with law firms and communicate what Diversity Dividends means to them;
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Access to a comprehensive Dashboard Review and Partnership Guide; and
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Invitations to participate in regular community calls and special events with Diversity Lab and fellow Collective members.
Click to View a Preview of the Partnership Guide
Participants will receive also access to a customized Diversity Dividends Dashboard developed by Diversity Lab’s data team that highlights areas of positive progress and challenges from the Annual Outside Counsel Evaluation for their top firms (up to 20). More than simply another data tool, Diversity Lab serves as advisors to participants on how to use the data collected from their firms to partner with them on immediate next steps and longer-term actions they can work on together to make meaningful improvements.
What Data Do Legal Departments Collect Through DDC?
On an annual basis, Diversity Lab collects the following information from law firms on behalf of DDC legal departments:
- How many associates, counsel, and partners who worked on our legal department’s matters during the past calendar year are: (a) women, (b) from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups (disaggregated by population, if possible), (c) LGBTQ+ lawyers, and (d) lawyers with disabilities?
- How many of the lawyers who had consistent and direct interaction with the in-house lawyers in our legal department via written correspondence, phone or video, or in-person meetings are from the four underrepresented groups identified above?
- How many of the relationship partners and/or leads for our legal department’s matter(s) or case(s) are from the four underrepresented groups identified above?
- How many of the lawyers who received business generation credit in the top one or two categories (e.g., origination credit, matter lead credit) that most significantly impacts compensation are from the four underrepresented groups identified above?
- Did you complete the most recent Inclusion Blueprint?
What are the End Goals and Collective Prompts?
Diversity Lab will minimize the legal department resources needed to analyze outside counsel diversity performance and teams by assisting with data collection, analytics, and providing access to the Diversity Dividends Dashboard that evaluates each legal department’s top 20 firms (using their responses to the Annual Outside Counsel Evaluation and the Inclusion Blueprint).
Within two years after joining the Collective, members commit to hold law firms accountable if they do not show year-over-year progress on at least 3 of the 5 annual outside counsel evaluation metrics.
How Does a Legal Department Get Started?
Registration to join the Diversity Dividends Collective is open! To learn more, please email Valerie Portillo at valerie@diversitylab.com.
To support the Collective, specifically the individualized data collection, analysis, access to the Diversity Dividends Dashboard, and advice and coaching from the Diversity Lab team, there is an annual fee of $7,500 with a minimum two-year commitment.