It would be fair to say that the legal profession has had an awkward relationship with diversity. For many decades, diverse lawyers have faced high thresholds and other artificial barriers to entry. Over time, things eventually started to change, and the concepts of diversity and inclusion were introduced, appreciated and adopted. Even then, it is often noted that law firms and departments were better at hiring than retention, and better at inclusion than integration.

Despite this accelerated progress, the profession clearly has not completed its journey. If it were otherwise, law firms and departments wouldn’t incorporate diversity teams, or monitor hiring, retention and attrition.

In all this, perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question the entire time. Maybe the issue isn’t about how the legal profession handles diversity, maybe it’s about how we handle people. After all, we are a service industry with nothing to sell but our people and how they apply their talent to solve client problems. For understandable reasons, law firms use legacy terms like ‘capacity management’ ‘human capital’ and ‘human resources.’ But if the talent wars have taught us anything, it’s that humans aren’t resources.

The lawyers who make up the (hopefully) diverse roster are people, and the complex challenge of handling them is not met by delegation to an HR department. It is a leadership issue, and it calls for behaviors which don’t come naturally to law firm leaders, and soft skills which they mostly don’t have.

In this and subsequent lessons, we’ll break the discussion into the four phases of a career within a firm or department: 1) hiring; 2) inclusion; 3) support; and 4) retention. In this series we’ll hear perspectives, stories and best practices from GCs, and also from outside professionals with fresh insights. But for now, let’s lay out the behaviors and the associated soft skills which will be called for throughout our discussion.

Key Behaviors Soft Skills
1. Be involved Inclusive leadership
2. Be accessible Emotional intelligence
3.  Give support Empathy
4.  Give recognition Compassion