CLOC recently released its 2021 State of the Industry survey, which revealed a major shift in priorities for corporate law departments and their ops teams. Diversity, which had not been high on the priority list in prior surveys, rose all the way to the top of the list from fifth out of seven priorities in 2020 – above automating legal process and implementing new technology. Here’s what Haven says:
“It's top of mind for everybody right now. We've come out of a period that really hit everyone hard in a lot of different ways. One has been the blatant and horrible racial injustices that litter our society. We need to make sure that we're doing our part in solving that problem.”
Intel’s vice president and general counsel, Steve Rodgers, made a splash in late 2019 when he trumpeted his frustration with the snail’s pace progress on diversity in the legal profession and called for a Moore’s Law for diversity.
“That sluggish progress is not enough for our profession, and it certainly is not enough for Intel – where we pride ourselves on taking bold risks to achieve rapid progress,” he wrote. “In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore penned Moore’s Law, a prediction of constant, momentous improvement that has become the driving force for progress in the computer industry. Our industry’s belief in our ability to achieve the core promise of Gordon’s prediction has driven thousands of engineers and scientists to produce ever-faster computer chips. We believe that driving real progress in the legal profession’s diversity requires taking risks and being audacious, in the best spirit of Moore’s Law.”
Haven agrees that there is still much work to be done at Intel and beyond. “We are ensuring that the partners we work with are focused on it, and we're ensuring that we're focused on it internally. But we have to go broader than that as an industry. We have to work on the pipeline. We have to make legal a more compelling and attractive industry for young, diverse professionals to come into. Those are huge challenges, and CLOC is in a position to make a difference. Those matters of the heart came through as a priority in our survey, and they will be top of mind for the board and our leadership moving forward into CLOC 3.0.”
Published August 2, 2021.
