Legal leaders looking to do more internally on diversity and inclusion are beginning to demand that candidate pools be diverse and are working creatively to eliminate implicit and unconscious biases.

Verona Dorch, the chief legal officer of St. Louis-based Peabody Energy Inc., told Corporate Counsel in an interview that she made it clear to both internal and external recruiters that she wanted to have a diverse slate of candidates for interviews when she started her role in 2015. Dorch said she no longer wanted recruiters to say they will look for the "best person for the job" and not keep diversity in mind.

"No one is saying we're not hiring the best person," Dorch said. "Let's take that discussion off of the table because I think that floats into an unconscious bias area."

She said the search firms that she works with for in-house hires are committed to diversity and bringing diverse candidates with a talented background to her.

Much of the discussion on diversity and inclusion has been focused on law firms. However, Diversity Lab started the Mansfield Rule for legal departments. The rule requires the 22 corporate legal departments who signed up in April 2019 to track the metrics of their candidate pool. Just past the midway point of the yearlong pilot program, Lisa Kirby, chief intelligence and knowledge sharing officer at Diversity Lab, said there has been a change in the way of thinking within many of the participating legal departments.

"Most legal departments were not previously tracking candidate pools," Kirby said. "That has been a significant cultural change."

Although Diversity Lab has not yet formally compiled all of the data, Leila Hock, director of legal department partnerships and inclusion initiatives at Diversity Lab, said many of the larger legal departments that have help from human resources or legal operations are having an easier time tracking those metrics.

Hock said it is easier to track candidate pools when it "is not resting on one lawyer."

A data point participants must strive to comply with is to have 50% of people from underrepresented groups interviewed for 70% of leadership roles within the department. Jim Chosy, general counsel of U.S. Bank in Minneapolis, said he has made that part of his legal department's hiring policy.

Chosy, who said his legal department was early to sign on to the Mansfield Rule, is now keeping the required metrics to improve diversity. He also said he has a method in place to eliminate bias in the interview process.

"One thing we do to rinse out biases is to conduct interviews in a panel approach," Chosy said. "A panel of us speaking to one candidate helps to eliminate, to the extent that we can, any unconscious bias that one individual manager might bring."

Recruitment, Chosy said, is sometimes a challenge because he does not often hire someone straight from law school. To diversify the pool of candidates for in-house roles, he and his team have begun to develop connections with affinity bar associations.

"That has been a terrific source for finding candidates," Chosy said.

Where general counsel could improve on diversity is making their firms more accountable on their own diversity and inclusion efforts. Chosy said he is asking his firms to become Mansfield Rule-certified since his legal department is working toward the program's goals.

Dorch, however, said corporate legal leaders need to show their firms they are not reaching for a minimum standard on diversity.

"I think what is going to start to move the needle is when certain firms start to get fired by GCs because they're not living up to the diversity requirements," Dorch said. "I think until we articulate that is part of the reason [firms are fired] it is not going to change."

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