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While in-house departments leverage a host of e-discovery, information governance and legal analytics tools, the panelists of Legalweek's "Using Technology to Build a Culture of Inclusion in the Legal Profession" said they weren't aware of specific software to improve lawyer diversity.

But they noted that legal departments are still actively requiring outside counsel to staff diverse lawyers on their matters, and trying to figure out how to leverage technology toward that goal.

"While we haven't quite gotten to being able to use metrics, we are actually implementing a new matter management system which will not only track our internal matters but also track how our outside law firms staff matters," said Jennifer Heil, deputy head of litigation at MUFG.

Panelist Lani Quarmby, associate GC and managing director of Bank of America, said her company doesn't leverage technology to measure their outside counsel's diversity. Instead, they manually obtain statistics from their outside firms regarding diversity.

Although technology wasn't currently being used by many to track diversity, the lawyers said it has a needed place in inclusion.

"I would always be interested in automating or improving the use of [technology] and not using a full-time employee for combining all these diversity statistics of all our law firms and vendors," Quarmby said.

"I feel that the key aspect is we aren't going to buy, for example, a new system to just track diversity but to the extent we can integrate that into a system that we are already going to use, that is extremely valuable to us," Heil added.

Heil said she thinks there is greater diversity in federal regulatory agencies, in part, because of the government's initiatives requiring metrics tracking diversity hiring, promotion, retention and inclusion.

"You have areas of the federal government where you really do have amazing people like the DOJ and some of the regulators," Heil explained. "They are second-to-none in subject-matter expertise that they have. You can't tell me their salaries are anywhere close to what they'd make as a partner at a law firm."

The issue of diversity in the legal industry has recently entered the spotlight following a public discussion on why diverse attorneys at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison weren't reaching the partner level of the elite firm at the same rate as their white male counterparts.

This week, over 100 GCs signed an open letter declaring their insistence of diverse legal staffs from their outside counsel. Paul Weiss also reiterated its history of inclusion and championing diversity in a firmwide email obtained by the New York Law Journal, but nonetheless said it would be re-evaluating its partnership pipeline and inclusion practices.