Leslie Richards-Yellen of Hogan Lovells.

When it comes to promoting diversity among their outside lawyers, more and more clients are demanding that firms show, not just tell.

At 2,685-lawyer Hogan Lovells, the pace of client requests for demographic details about the firm's diversity has picked up and intensified since last year.

According to Leslie Richards-Yellen, who is director of inclusion for Hogan Lovells in the Americas, 47 clients requested diversity demographics from the firm in the first quarter of 2018—nearly double the 25 requests over the same period last year.

“We now have one person dedicated to filling out RFPs and client surveys about this,” Richards-Yellen said. She rates the increasing number of requests as good news. “We are delighted with the focus on diversity,” she said.

The growing attention on the issue has helped hone Richards-Yellen's notions of what client questions trigger the most meaningful responses. She and other lawyers focused on diversity say surveys that capture a snapshot of a firm's demographics—like what percentage of the workforce are women, underrepresented minorities and LGBTQ—provide just a starting point.

To really understand a firm's commitment, she said, clients need to go further, with questions like: “What kinds of work are people doing?”

Richards-Yellen said more clients are beginning to request the prospective roles and likely hours logged by specific members of a legal team proposed in a RFP, so they can gauge if a minority or female lawyer is being pitched as leader, a true participant—or just a token.

Sharon Nelles, a New York partner at 812-lawyer Sullivan & Cromwell, agrees clients need to delve deeper when they want to learn about diversity progress at their outside firms. Nelles helped roll out a program established by JPMorgan Chase & Co. earlier this year that requires 50 percent of the bank's outside litigation teams to be led by women or underrepresented minorities.

“A law firm's commitment to, and success with, diversity efforts cannot be revealed by a numbers snapshot,” Nelles said in an email.

“Statistics may make for easy comparisons across points in time, or across firms, but cannot measure culture,” Nelles said. “Clients can support diversity efforts by asking firms to dive deeper, thus establishing that this is not a numbers game.”

For example, Nelles said, clients can ask for the makeup of the teams currently working for them; what's being done to make specific client teams and the firms as a whole more diverse; and how those programs impact client service.

“Then follow-up. I am happy to tell you our numbers. I would rather tell you about our diverse lawyers. I would prefer even more to have those lawyers meet with you and partner with you to develop lasting relationships, which is what ultimately will push up the numbers,” Nelles added.

Due Diligence

One Hogan Lovells' client, Florida-based NextEra Energy Resources, definitely dug deeper after the firm submitted an RFP to the company. In its bid, Hogan Lovells had identified David Mitchell, a fifth-year associate who is African-American, as a lawyer who would work on the team if the firm won the work.

According to Richards-Yellen and Mitchell, Bobbie King, a senior attorney at NextEra, then stepped in to do some due diligence on the firm's diversity claims. King called Mitchell and asked if he knew about the RFP bid—and if he anticipated he really would be doing the work if NextEra awarded it to Hogan Lovells.

Mitchell and King, a former Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom associate, had known each other; they both are members of The Society of 1844, a group of about 60 African-American male lawyers, mostly working at big New York firms and Fortune 500 companies. The group is named after the year that Macon Bolling Allen, the first black lawyer in the United States, was admitted to practice law in Maine, and members meet monthly, according to Mitchell. (King declined to comment for this story because of his company's policies limiting contact with the press.)

King wanted to know if including Mitchell on the RFP was about “just putting someone's name or face on a pitch,” Mitchell said. King peppered him with questions, Mitchell recalled: Who would be supervising Mitchell on this deal? How was Mitchell's overall experience with that partner's prior supervision? He could answer those questions positively, Mitchell said.

“Folks at these companies, when they are asking for diverse teams, they are going to start to investigate,” Mitchell said, adding that he made sure to tell his supervising partners and Richards-Yellen about his exchange with King.

Richards-Yellen said she was elated to know a client had dug that deep. And, no surprise, Hogan Lovells won the work.