Diversity Dividends Collective

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:

1. Enroll a senior lawyer who will serve in an oversight role for the Diversity Dividends Collective;
2. Actively participate in knowledge sharing on quarterly calls with fellow Collective members;
3. Require your law firms to complete the Annual Outside Counsel Evaluation, administered by Diversity Lab, each year;
4. Require your law firms to complete the Firm Leadership Assessment of the Inclusion Blueprint, administered by Diversity Lab, every other year;
5. Engage in follow up conversations with each of your law firms, using the data collected by Diversity Lab; and
6. Divert work from firms that do not show year-over-year progress on the metrics evaluated by the Collective and provide more work to firms that do.

Our overall goal is to create more diverse, equitable and inclusive outside counsel teams through a standardized, collective effort. We cannot do that successfully with the increasing amount of bespoke surveys sent to law firms that do not measure the most impactful metrics or hold firms accountable to making meaningful progress. In that spirit, to join the Diversity Dividends Collective, your legal department also commits to only use the Diversity Dividends Annual Outside Counsel Evaluation to collect diversity demographic data from the law firms you select to participate.

Working together as a Collective, participation should produce four dividends for participants and the legal profession over time:

1. Increased diversity of the teams working on participants’ matters;
2. 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;
3. Accountability for law firms and legal departments that is transparent and consequential — using both carrot and stick — with legal departments moving work towards and away from law firms based on their diversity progress over time;
4. Broad systemic change in the legal field through industry-wide coalescence around the granular diversity metrics that really matter and the collective “power of the purse” to wield the aggregate legal spend of hundreds of legal departments.

In addition, upon registration, participants receive access to a Knowledge Bank with everything they need 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;
• Access to a comprehensive partnership guide; and
• 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.

Annual Outside Counsel Evaluation: On an annual basis, Collective members will ask the following five questions of their select law firms:

1. 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? 
2. 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?
3. 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? 
4. 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?
5. Did you complete the most recent Inclusion Blueprint?

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). 

No later than two years after joining the Collective, members commit to divert work from firms that do not show year-over-year progress on at least 3 of the 5 annual outside counsel evaluation metrics by a) no longer giving new matters to those firms, and b) beginning to transition existing business to law firms that do show progress on the metrics evaluated by the Collective.

Registration to join the Diversity Dividends Collective will open in Spring 2023, and info sessions are now open! You’re welcome to register here to attend a session that works for you, or email Valerie Portillo at valerie@diversitylab.com.

The MTN Fund is subsidizing the majority of the costs associated with Diversity Dividends. To supplement 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 $5,000 with a minimum two-year commitment.