Panelists at a Corporate Legal Operations Consortium Vegas Institute session Wednesday walked attendees through their processes, strategies and benchmarking metrics for improving diversity in-house.

At last year's CLOC Vegas Institute, a similar panel convened to launch a brainstorming session on legal ops' role in increasing diversity and inclusion in the legal industry. Many of those panelists returned this year, bringing strategies and experiences with them to share.

“We started out with 'boil the ocean,'” said Lisa Brzycki, the senior director of legal strategy, technology and operations at Northwestern Mutual. “We were trying to figure out what could be of value.” 

The group presented a diversity and inclusion maturity index for legal departments. Teams with diversity and inclusion programs that give their company a competitive market advantage, have allocated resources, show signs of sustainability in leadership and offer formal sponsorship with active metrics are “comprehensive.”

Legal departments that view diversity initiatives as risk mitigation and offer no programming or mentoring were in the earliest “regulatory” stage.

“The [diversity and inclusion] maturity index … is just a guide to help you help your legal departments innovate when it comes to D&I, to get people at the table,” said Marredia Crawford, Baker McKenzie's North American diversity and inclusion manager.

Lisa Brown, Starbucks Corp.'s legal and corporate affairs operations and strategy managing director, said her department has found success in creating a common lexicon for diversity and inclusion initiatives, and tracking metrics to analyze how new strategies are working.

Starbucks has also had a diversity and inclusion committee since 2002, one that received strong support from the company's general counsel. Panelists agreed that the inclusion aspect of diversity and inclusion is harder to measure, but it's a good sign if women and people of color aren't quickly leaving the company or being left out of leadership.

Legal ops panelists also stressed that their company's push for diversity hasn't just been in-house. Many said they're actively communicating with other companies, law schools and their outside counsel.

Oracle's director of legal operations programs and analytics, Sophia Davis, said her company requires panel firms to show diversity improvements and share metrics. Davis added Oracle requires firms include diversity data in their billing guidelines “so they can't bill without it.”

“We communicate back to our firms and hold them accountable,” she said. In a survey of the room, some in-house counsel and legal ops professionals said their departments had changed counsel over diversity.