Nixon Peabody offices in Washington, D.C. / Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

Nixon Peabody was selected to be the fifth and final firm to join Diversity Lab's Move the Needle Fund, a $5 million "laboratory" for research initiatives and programs designed to address the lack of diversity in the legal profession.

Nixon Peabody joins Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe; Goodwin Procter; Eversheds Sutherland; and Stoel Rives, along with more than 25 general counsel, who hail from such corporations as Bloomberg, Ford Motor Co., Starbucks, and 3M, among others.

The fund is novel because of its required collaboration and transparency: Participants must periodically and publicly share their successes and failures through a central portal, the D&I Dashboard, which will launch sometime in 2020; and each firm is focusing on a different aspect of diversity.

Nixon Peabody's goal addresses diversity within its own ranks. By 2025, the firm expects its equity partnership to consist of 30% women, 12% minorities, and 6% LGBTQ+. The firm's equity partnership is now comprised of 17% women, 7% minorities, and 3% LGBTQ+.

Orrick, on the other hand, is focusing on clients and pledges to have 40 of its most strategic clients served by teams that are "at a minimum 55% diverse" by 2025.

Nixon Peabody will contribute $1.25 million to the fund over the next five years. That figure pales in comparison to the number of hours firm attorneys will commit, including firm leadership and roughly two dozen partners, and the money the firm spends each year on attorney development, said firm managing partner and CEO Andrew Glincher.

"That significant amount of time will eclipse the amount we've put in the fund each year," Glincher said. "Even before Move the Needle, we were spending seven figures on training. We already had strategic retreats for each of our diverse affinity groups. We are devoting endless resources."

The expectation is that publicly sharing progress on respective goals will create standards for best practices, whether it be equity partnership, client matters or minority and women associate retention. Firms will develop programs drawn from winning Diversity in Law Hackathon pitches, empirical studies and successful practices in other industries.

Glincher admitted that the goals set by the firm are "aspirational" and acknowledged the difficulty of hitting these goals. But given the decades of failure in meaningfully advancing diversity in the law, Glincher felt the metrics are appropriate.

"We're in an industry where everybody is working on precedent," Glincher said. "I'm hoping we can be inspirational and aspirational. If you don't set aspirational goals, you don't have a chance of achieving them."

Nixon Peabody was chosen through a blind application process which saw applicants ranging from boutiques to large Am Law 200 firms. According to Diversity Lab, Nixon Peabody was chosen for the "boldness of its diversity goal and its willingness to devote critical resources, experiment with new ideas and share the outcomes."

The Move the Needle fund officially launched on Jan. 1.

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Law Firms Commit $5M to Tackle Legal Profession's Diversity Problem