Photo: Flamingo Images/Shutterstock

Diversity initiative announcements are nearing the point of eye-rolling ubiquity. Companies and law firms have been talking for years about hiring and promoting minorities and women. Yet the majority of executives, legal department leaders and law firm partners are still white males. 

"The tried-and-true conventional approaches that the legal industry has been following are not working at the rate of progress that we'd like to see," said Allon Stabinsky, senior vice president and chief deputy general counsel of Intel Corp. 

Bradley Gayton, Ford Motor Co.'s chief administrative officer and general counsel, acknowledged that "there is a fair amount of fatigue in this space." 

He added, "One of the things I've stopped doing is talking about why diversity is important. We're really focused more on what we can do to change things."

Gayton and Stabinsky are among a group of 26 in-house leaders from a broad cross-section of major brands, including Pfizer Inc., Uber Technologies Inc., PayPal, Starbucks Corp. and the San Francisco 49ers, that have joined with several law firms and Diversity Lab to create a multimillion-dollar think tank to address the legal industry's diversity problem. 

Yes, this is another diversity initiative. But resist the urge to eye roll—this is shaping up to be a different animal: an initiative built on collaboration, transparency and accountability wrapped around a framework of measurable, public diversity goals.    

Competitors unite, invest $5 million 

To get things moving, the participating law firms—Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe; Goodwin Procter; Eversheds Sutherland; Stoel Rives; and a fifth that will be named later through a blind selection process—are investing $5 million in a "Move the Needle Fund."   

"These are law firms that compete for business. These are not natural collaborators," said one of the initiative's founding in-house leaders, Lora Blum, senior vice president, general counsel and secretary of SurveyMonkey Inc. "A unique aspect of this is getting commitments from firms that normally would not work together." 

Blum and Stabinsky said their companies have worked with a few of the firms involved in the initiative, but the firms have not served as their go-to outside counsel. Stabinsky noted he was initially reluctant to "spend a lot of resources on helping law firms that are not significant legal providers to me." 

But then it occurred to him that he could experiment and work with the five firms at Diversity Lab and take what he learns back to Intel's primary outside counsel. 

"To me, that's an additive thing," he said. "Two is better than one." 

Over the next five years, the law firms will work with Diversity Lab to establish "aggressive, measurable diversity goals" and "experiment with research-based and data-driven ways to achieve" those goals, according to an announcement. 

At the same time, the companies and their in-house leaders will use their legal departments as testing grounds for the ideas that emerge from Diversity Lab. They hope to bring 100 more legal departments into the fold by 2020.  

Both sides have vowed to publicly report their findings and progress as the effort unfolds. Transparency, which has been lacking in too many previous initiatives, is a key element of the effort.  

"One of the things that people are nervous about, whether it be companywide or within legal departments or law firms, is people will put out their numbers but they won't necessarily put out their goals," Blum said. "Even if you don't meet your diversity goals, if you are brave enough to put them out there and share what you might do to meet them later—that can be an incredibly powerful statement."

'More work needs to be done'

Blum, Stabinsky and the other two dozen in-house leaders asserted in an open letter that they joined "Move the Needle" because they realized it was taking too long to bring transformative change to the legal industry. 

According to Diversity Lab, predictive modeling based on the last five years of ALM data suggests that, at the current rate of progress, it will take another 37 years for the percentage of women in equity partnerships at the largest 200 law firms in the country to reflect the number of women law school graduates, which has hovered around 50%. For racial minorities, it will take 64 years. 

"Where we've all failed in the legal profession is figuring out how to keep women and a more diverse population moving up through the ranks," Blum said. 

Intel has spent about $300 million in-house and externally since 2015 on diversity initiatives, according to Stabinsky. As part of the effort, the tech giant offers bonuses for outside firms that make progress with their diversity metrics. 

But Stabinsky said the "data is really spiky, and I'm not seeing a trend line that's making me feel like we're on a positive trajectory. More work needs to be done."

Is $5 million enough?

In light of the $300 million that Intel has spent on diversity, Stabinsky was asked whether $5 million was sufficient to spur real change. 

"We talked about this a lot within the Move the Needle Fund. I'll be candid, when you look at the things in the press release, if you look at it at a macro level you can say, '$5 million is not going to be enough to drive transformative change throughout an entire industry,'" he said. "But if you look at it at the micro level, think of this as an incubation laboratory. Investing $5 million in your laboratory is a huge investment." 

The ideal outcome, in Stabinsky's view, is that the ideas that come out of the lab will go viral, spreading across legal departments and law firms of all sizes and in all industries. If enough corporations buy into the initiative and implement diversity programs from the lab, outside law firms that want their business will want to get on board. 

"We're going to give exposure to these new law firms. But we're not going to give exposure to the usual suspects," he said of the firms in the initiative. "If we can establish relationships and books of business with diverse lawyers, they will assume leadership positions in the firm and they will attract more diverse talent who will say, 'I can succeed in a law firm like this.'" 

He added, "It's about influencing the composition of the next generation of diverse lawyers." 

And it's OK to remain skeptical. Blum acknowledged she and her fellow in-house leaders approached the initiative with a "healthy amount of skepticism." When someone in the group had an idea, she said the others wanted to know what made it different or novel, what sets it apart from other initiatives, other failed efforts.  

"I think the only way that we will be different is if we follow through, which we intend to," she said.