The last year has seen increased focus on better ways to push diversity accountability. ABA Resolution 113 urges legal service providers “to expand and create opportunities at all levels of responsibility for diverse attorneys and urges clients to assist in the facilitation of opportunities for diverse attorneys, and to direct a greater percentage of the legal services they purchase, both currently and in the future, to diverse attorneys.” In addition, the ABA 360 Diversity and Inclusion Commission released several tools to help increase diversity, including a Model Survey that many corporations have supported. The Model Survey allows corporations to evaluate the diversity metrics of law firms and the ABA to collect aggregate data and uniformly measure industry progress.

Consider, also, companies that have demanded higher levels of diversity from their counsel, such as (i) HP, which has announced it can withhold 10 percent of fees from law firms that do not meet diversity and inclusion goals; (ii) Facebook, which announced on April 2 that it will require 33 percent diversity of women and minorities working on its matters by outside counsel and will “actively identify and create clear and measurable leadership opportunities for women and minorities”; (iii) MetLife will require its outside counsel to provide a formal talent development plan on how they will promote and retain diverse talent by June 18 and (iv) other general counsel who have encouraged that firms be fired for failure to improve their diversity numbers and for this firing to be publicly shared.

Corporations and law firms have partnered to advance diversity and inclusion in the legal profession for a while now. At times, the relationship has been framed as a challenge from clients to those who do their work, and at other times a partnership with common goals and challenges. In 1998, BellSouth Executive Vice President and General Counsel Charles Morgan initiated “Diversity in the Workplace: A Statement of Principles,” to which more than 500 corporations committed. In 2004, Rick Palmore, then CLO of Sara Lee, issued a Call to Action that again was joined by hundreds of corporations as a result of the slow progress on diversity in the legal profession. Microsoft has had a long-standing diversity and inclusion bonus program that rewards law firms for meeting its diversity and inclusion goals, and it recently updated the program to reward firms with at least one diverse relationship partner and more diverse lead attorneys on its matters.