Diversity means having people of diverse culture, experiences, and backgrounds in all levels of the workplace, and making sure that those people feel invested and included. I got involved because it’s something that I feel passionate about. If you look at the research, women lawyers make up almost 50% of law firm associates and then, by the time you get to partnership, it’s about 20%. And if you look at racial and ethnic diversity, the numbers are even worse. So, I think that, as a senior lawyer and woman in the law, it’s important to help the next generation of women lawyers succeed.
I have tried to do that in a variety of ways, including mentoring women, connecting women with one another, and speaking at conferences and on panels about diversity and my own career journey. I’ve also spent a lot of time volunteering with organizations whose mission is to foster and promote the advancement of women in the law – for example, I am the deputy global chair of in-house counsel for the Women in Law Empowerment Forum (WILEF).
Last year, I also represented the CBS law department at the Diversity in Law Hackathon at Harvard Law School, sponsored by Diversity Lab, which brought together teams of in-house counsel and law firm partners to address challenges related to diversity and inclusion in the legal profession. Teams came up with innovative ideas for increasing diversity and inclusion in the law, and presented them in a ‘Shark Tank’-style pitch presentation to a panel of judges. Diversity Lab is currently working to implement some of the actual ideas. My team looked at the challenge of enhancing access to opportunities for diverse lawyers, and we came up with an idea called ‘Opp Shop,’ which is an app-based assignment system that gives all junior lawyers in a law firm the opportunity to bid on assignments. The aim is to avoid the ‘hallway staffing’ phenomenon where partners just walk outside their office and grab someone who looks like them to work on choice assignments. With Opp Shop, all lawyers have access to the same opportunities in the firm for assignments.
At CBS, we’re very committed to diversity. CBS has a Diversity Council that dedicates its time and efforts to assist the company in meeting its goals in D&I in both the letter and spirit of those goals. We have many affinity groups, including the Women’s Networking Group and CBS Pride, our LGBT employee resource group. The Diversity Council identifies best practices from across divisions that help build the careers of diverse employees, and works to implement them company-wide, and to strengthen the dialogue across the corporation around the topics of diversity and inclusion.
The law department fits into these efforts by leading by example. The CBS law department as a whole is very diverse, and we have a lot of diverse lawyers at the section head and divisional general counsel level. We also have a female GC of CBS Corporation who is strongly supportive of efforts towards diversity and inclusion. I manage the litigation group, which is comprised of a group of attorneys and legal professionals, almost all of whom are diverse. That’s something we are very proud of and that is very important to us. You can ‘talk the talk,’ but you also have to ‘walk the walk,’ and the makeup of our group reflects our own commitment to diversity.
When it comes to D&I, I think the law department should look to lead by example. We have lawyers in our group who are involved in the CBS Diversity Council, and we also have an active CBS Law Department Diversity Committee, of which I serve as chair of the Speakers Roundtable Subcommittee. We bring in speakers for the law department on diversity-related topics, and we’ve sponsored programs on unconscious bias and how in-house and outside counsel can work together to promote diversity. For example, we put together a panel that featured the GCs of Simon & Schuster, Showtime, and CBS Corporation – all of whom are diverse – candidly speaking about their own career journeys and obstacles they have faced.
CBS also has signed onto several amicus briefs in support of policies that advance diversity and inclusion in the workplace. For example, we signed onto a brief regarding the issue of workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Our lawyers are also members, and in many cases officers, of organizations that promote diversity, including the Minority Corporate Counsel Association, Corporate Counsel Women of Color, and WILEF, to name just a few. We’re also involved in pro bono efforts that focus on diversity, such as the Thurgood Marshall Program, which allows diverse high school students to shadow CBS lawyers, and is spearheaded by the head of our East Coast labor and employment group. We also have a mentoring program for in-house lawyers, which is not limited to diverse lawyers, but is an initiative of the CBS Law Diversity Committee. The diversity committee also publishes a newsletter called Diversity Download, which highlights the efforts and achievements of the law department and individual lawyers in the diversity space, and provides information on upcoming diversity-related programs.
We also encourage diversity and inclusion among our outside legal service providers. As in-house counsel, we are uniquely situated to help move the needle on diversity. While I think law firms want to do the right thing when it comes to diversity, as in-house counsel we are in a position to use the ‘power of our purse’ to help nudge them in the right direction.
As head of litigation for CBS, I do my best to ensure that all our matters for which we retain outside counsel are staffed with diverse teams, and that our outside counsel guidelines reflect our commitment to diversity and our expectations that law firms assign diverse teams to our matters. We’ve instituted a system where we can track the diversity of law firm timekeepers working on each of our matters through our billing software. That allows us to hold firms accountable and also to measure how we are doing as a department on diversity. In addition, our outside counsel guidelines state that we expect firms to staff our matters with diverse teams. When law firms come in for a pitch, we reiterate that expectation. Of course, we also expect the diverse team members to play a meaningful role in the particular CBS matter. We also ask firms to fill out an annual survey that asks for a lot of information, including information about the firm’s diversity generally, as well as the diversity of timekeepers assigned to CBS matters.
We are constantly reevaluating our approach, and have had discussions about whether it’s better to utilize a carrot or a stick. We currently use both a carrot and a stick approach. If a firm wants CBS business, they need to commit to using a diverse team – that’s the carrot (awarding business to firms that demonstrate a commitment to diversity); and if firms don’t take diversity seriously, they run the risk of not being given business in the future – that’s the stick.
As for what’s next, I expect that our policies will continue to evolve and become more robust, and we’ll continue to make the business and ethical case for diversity and inclusion with our outside counsel. In the profession generally, I think we are going to see more of a focus not just on diversity, but on inclusion as well. People have been talking about diversity for a while, but I think the inclusion piece has been somewhat lacking, so I think we’re going to see a focus on inclusion as well. There has been progress in the legal field over the past decade, but there remains more to do.