(Left to right) Tina Shah Paikeday, global D&I adviser services practice leader, Russell Reynolds Associates; Willie Hernandez, vice president, deputy general counsel at Hewlett Packard; Michael Tang, senior vice president, general counsel and secretary at Agilent Technologies; Jennifer Lagunas, vice president of corporate legal, governance, and operations and assistant corporate secretary at AbbVie Inc.; Damien Atkins, senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary at The Hershey Co.; and Cynthia Dow, managing director, global legal, practice leader at Russell Reynolds Associates, at the Minority Corporate Counsel Association’s Creating Pathways to Diversity Conference in New York on Tuesday. Photo: Daniel Clark/ALM
Those leading legal departments have the opportunity to play a big role in championing diverse candidates by soliciting feedback and showing them they belong, a panel at the Minority Corporate Counsel Association’s 2019 Creating Pathways to Diversity Conference in New York said Tuesday.
Willie Hernandez, vice president, deputy general counsel at Hewlett Packard, said as a young in-house attorney at IBM he was sent to South Carolina to help close a transaction when his managers were told he was not the right attorney to send. He said he was not sure if it had to do with his age or race.
