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Sidley Austin and Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson have hired new diversity executives to replace departing directors.

Sidley lifer María Meléndez is the firm's new chief diversity officer and succeeds Sally Olson, who had held the position since 2011 and is retiring May 1.

Maria Melendez.

Meléndez first joined Sidley as an associate in 1993 and rose to litigation partner in 2002. She has been a longtime member of the firm's diversity and inclusion committee and served as chair for the New York division from 2002 to 2016. She is also the chair of LatinoJustice PRLDEF, a New York-based organization that advocates against legal injustices facing the Latino community.

Meléndez will dedicate all of her time to this role and cease actively practicing as a litigator, the firm said. She will not be on any executive or management committees in her new position.

Fried Frank has tapped Stephanie Quappe to be the firm's director of diversity and inclusion, following Asker Saeed, who left to start his own consulting firm last year. She joins from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, where she has been an executive in the organization's workforce diversity and inclusion team for four and a half years.

Before that, Quappe had her own consulting firm, Quappe Associates, and was a senior diversity manager at Deloitte from 2008 to 2013.

Quappe is Fried Frank's fourth diversity director since 2007. The firm's first diversity director, Maja Hazell, left the firm in 2013 and is now the global head of diversity at White & Case. Don Smith held the role between 2014 and 2017 before jumping to Crowell & Moring.

This year, Fried Frank made another step to accommodate its women and LGBTQ attorneys by offering to reimburse its lawyers $25,000 for each surrogacy or adoption event. The new benefit comes on top of its other parent-friendly perks, which include 12 weeks of paid parental leave, back-up child care, and breast milk delivery services.

Chief diversity officers as well as so-called "concierge services" have become increasingly in demand among law firms as they jockey to recruit and retain the women and minority attorneys demanded by many clients, especially large institutions. Intel, for example, announced late last year that it would drop firms whose U.S. equity partnerships aren't at least 21% women and 10% nonwhite.

Nearly a dozen Am Law 200 firms hired or promoted CDOs in 2019 alone, including Holland & Knight, DLA Piper, Greenspoon Marder, and Crowell & Moring.

Weil, Gotshal & Manges rolled out concierge services similar to Fried Frank's this year as well, including reimbursement to firm attorneys who want to freeze their eggs for a later pregnancy—a perk also reportedly offered by Kirkland & Ellis and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton.

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