Ernest Tuckett and April Miller Boise, co-founders of the Black GC 2025 initiative.

I was pleased to see the recent publicity roll out for the Black GC list 2025, an initiative by leading general counsel to increase the number of African-American GCs in the Fortune 1000 from 38 currently to 100 by 2025. Corporate Counsel wrote about the initiative here.

The list of GC-ready candidates is impressive, and hopefully the folks behind the scenes at this initiative are pushing the list directly to CEOs, EVPs of HR, and even board members. All 34 names on this list will be familiar to any good search firm.

It's been 10 years since I moderated the diversity panel at Corporate Counsel's SuperConference, and I can offer encouraging statistics from 2010 to 2020. Sixteen percent of our search firm's placements during the past decade have been African-American attorneys.  And 27% of our placements have met diversity objectives as defined by our corporate clients.  While I am proud of those numbers, our boutique search firm is not large enough to offer proof of progress at the macro level. Since only 3.8% of Fortune 1000 GCs are African-American in 2020, work clearly remains to be done.

My action step suggestion is to also focus on getting more minority candidates into the pipeline generally. This means thoughtful hiring at the staff through deputy general counsel levels. I have offered to supply a much larger and broader list of names to the initiative, if it chooses to go beyond its understandably GC-focused mission. And any law department leaders reading this are welcome to reach out to me for some complimentary information on senior counsel and AGC worthy candidates. I am willing to help in this area even if your company chooses not to engage a search firm.

I hope this is a topic that we can revisit at SuperConference 2020. More importantly, I hope we are celebrating this initiative's success in 2025—if not sooner. My goal for this month's column is to draw additional attention to Black GC list 2025. Please forward and circulate that website among your peers. Thank you.

Mike Evers recruits attorneys for corporate legal departments throughout the United States. Visit www.everslegal.com. His firm also offers experienced in-house counsel to companies on an adjunct basis.