Corporate law departments across the country have recognized the importance of having a diverse staff, and as a result, are now showing some success with recruitment and retention of lawyers of diverse backgrounds. A few in-house counsel have gone as far as to sever relationships with outside counsel that do not share their commitment. But for companies that operate globally, inclusiveness is more than just "the right thing to do" or a boost to the bottom line. For these companies, diversity failure could doom efforts across the board.
Recently, Diversity & the Bar® talked to corporate counsel representatives from four global companies that—despite notable diversity track records—are not content to rest on their laurels. Intel Corporation, 3M, Honeywell International, and FedEx have had huge success on a worldwide scale, and their inclusiveness efforts are a large part of the reason why.
Approaches to Diversity
Most of the recruiting by these companies is conducted through a combination of working with diverse bar associations, word-of-mouth, and headhunters who always keep in mind their inclusion goals. All of these four law departments have internal programs that focus on increasing the range of their diverse candidate pool.
"If we have a traditional workforce that's all homogeneous and U.S.-based, then we don't have the right solutions for our customer base," says Cindy Faatz, acting chair of the Diversity Management Review Committee of Intel's legal department. "From a legal department standpoint, we're faced with a lot of issues, and if you don't have a diverse range of opinions, you won't arrive at creative solutions."
Headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., Intel is 38 years old. When the company started, it relied on traditional channels of recruitment, such as headhunters and job boards. Later, when Intel realized they were not getting the population of candidates they wanted, they narrowed their sources to headhunters who specialize in diversity and began advertising on job boards where more minorities and women would view the postings. Intel's strategy entails attending conferences hosted by notable associations such as the Hispanic Bar Association (HBA) and the Minority Corporate Counsel Association (MCCA®), as well as job fairs held by the California State Bar and other bar associations. They've also changed the manner in which they communicate. "Intel is a strong corporate culture, and traditionally people who were successful had a distinct work style of constructive confrontation, which was very assertive," says Faatz, who has been with the company 21 years.
The company changed its approach to include alternate work styles that were equally effective. It offers training to increase awareness of the benefits of a diverse workforce and a mentoring program so that women and minorities can visibly see role models, and subsequently feel empowered to achieve higher ranks in the company.
Honeywell, headquartered in Morristown, N.J., has 110 attorneys in its law departments around the world. It relies on interviewing a broad slate of diverse attorneys to fill openings in the law department. Recruitment is conducted both by word-of-mouth and through recruiters, who are required by Honeywell to always present a diverse group of applicants. When Senior Vice President and General Counsel Peter Kreindler was hired more than 14 years ago, he spearheaded a successful revamping of the law department's hiring approach. "When I arrived at the company, I noticed that there was no defined process for diversity recruiting and a rather one-dimensional function," says Kreindler. "I worked to change our approach to recruiting and sought to hire a more diverse set of lawyers, those who could bring different perspectives and thinking to Honeywell. In the process, I think we upgraded the entire law department."
At Honeywell, 39 percent of the lawyers are women and 15 percent are minorities. In the past year, the numbers have risen so that 50 percent of the attorneys hired are women and 33 percent are minorities.
Innovation Meets Recruitment Challenges
Two of the law departments, FedEx and 3M, have had an ongoing challenge in recruitment—their locations. "Memphis may not be a place in which minorities desire to relocate unless they have ties here," says Connie Lewis Lensing, vice president of Legal at FedEx. "Our biggest challenge in terms of diversity is increasing our pool of applicants; we are amazed at the dearth of applicants who are minorities."
One of FedEx's strategies is to benchmark with different companies in the area, such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and International Paper, and to learn from each other's recruiting efforts. FedEx's legal department identifies promising minority attorneys in the community and recruits them when they have had five or more years of experience. The law department monitors minority web sites and also sponsors events at National Bar Association (NBA) meetings. Today, the numbers reflect the beginning of the effort: FedEx and its subsidiaries employ 129 attorneys domestically; 13 percent of all lawyers are minorities and 27 percent are women. FedEx wants to improve on these numbers and is taking the initiative to do so.
3M, headquartered in St. Paul, Minn., faces a similar geographical challenge. While the most recent 2004 U.S. Census data reflects a national black population of 12.8 percent, Minnesota's black population stands at 4.1 percent; American Indian and Alaska Native persons make up only 1.2 percent of the Minnesota population, and Asian Americans comprise only 3.4 percent. Caucasians account for 89.9 percent of the state's population. "A perennial issue for us is the demographic fact that there are proportionately fewer minority lawyers and law school students here because the state as a whole has a smaller minority community," explains 3M Senior Vice President, Legal Affairs and General Counsel Richard Ziegler.
3M is a charter member of Diversity in Practice, a group of 28 local law firms and corporate law departments that came together to find creative solutions to the area's demographic challenges. The group pools resources to promote Minneapolis-St. Paul as an attractive and desirable place for minority lawyers to live and work.
3M Assistant General Counsel Joe Otterstetter has overseen legal recruitment for the firm for the past four years. He reports that in that time, a third of the lawyers the company has hired have been lawyers of color. "I always say that Minneapolis and St. Paul are the best kept secrets in the African American community," quips Otterstetter. "When people move here, they tend to stay and love it. So, part of my challenge has been getting people to consider the Twin Cities as a place to build their career and raise a family."
Otterstetter cites the annual MCCA conference as a great resource to build relationships nationally with minority and female attorneys, and also credits his alma mater, the University of Minnesota, for recruiting people of color from around the country to attend law school in the area.
A lack of veteran applicants to practice intellectual property (IP) law is another challenge shared by 3M and Intel.
3M Legal Affairs has 96 lawyers in the United States—41 are in the Office of General Counsel, and 55 are in the Office of Intellectual Property Counsel. "Our Office of General Counsel has 37 percent females and 12 percent racial minorities," says Michael Dai, assistant general counsel and chair of 3M Legal Affairs Diversity Committee. "On the IP side, we're 30 percent female and four percent racial minority. There is the additional constraint that the pool of people having engineering and science backgrounds and students at the patent bar tend to be less diverse than the general counsel pool." 3M's lawyers recognize and accept the challenge to improve their diversity and they are working hard on meeting their recruiting and retention goals. The same is true across the company.
Faatz from Intel explains a scientific background is an added benefit for a patent attorney. "For the nature of the test you have to take, you have to have a technical degree," she says. She emphasizes, though, that not all IP attorneys are required to have knowledge of science, and that trademark attorneys can have a range of different backgrounds and still practice IP, such as attorneys from Yahoo, Google, and some entertainment lawyers. (For more insight on IP attorneys, read the article titled, "Manufacturing Success: Advice from Leading Product Liability Attorneys" in this issue of Diversity & the Bar®.)
Charting the Progress
While diversity is part of each company's corporate culture, they all have different ways of keeping on track of progress. One tactic is tying diversity efforts to management programs.
Honeywell monitors diversity numbers not only for the Department of Labor Employment Standards Administration of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, but also for internal reporting programs.
"Each executive has diversity as part of his or her goals," says Honeywell's Kreindler. "We've done better as a company in recent years, and I know the law department has done very well."
Bonuses at FedEx are partially tied to minority recruiting and hiring. One project requires managers to report the numbers of hired females and minorities, as well as how many were recruited and interviewed. Lewis Lensing says her managing directors, and others, plan to expand the project into other areas, such as attendance at diversity seminars and participation in other minority efforts such as mentoring.
Managers at FedEx receive a survey from each employee every year, which allows them to take the pulse of the workforce because this feedback gives each manager a snapshot of areas in which improvement is needed. Several survey questions, such as "My manager respects my culture," measure how the employees feel diversity is valued. And, according to Lensing, scores are very favorable.
Senior-level executives at 3M meet twice a year with the company's CEO to review their organization, and a key component of that is diversity, says Ziegler.
"3M had a strong drive for diversity before I got here and that included Legal Affairs," says Ziegler. "I was glad to embrace it and move forward with a few concrete things. We're not satisfied with the progress, but we're working toward it. In other words, I'm happy with what we're doing, but I'm not happy with where we are today." Intel sets metrics in terms of how it wants Intel's workforce to reflect the population of its communities, and management meets regularly to gauge its success.
"We never compromise our standard to hire the best, the brightest, people," says Faatz. "We don't hire to fit our numbers, but we do set the numbers as goals to achieve, and aspire to those goals, so that we're considering a very diverse candidate pool for every position that we hire."
The U.S. Intel workforce consists of 24.8 percent women and approximately 36 percent minorities. In the past year, minorities made up 40 percent of new hires, and 30 percent of new hires were women.
Priming the Pump
Since most corporate law departments do not hire directly from law school, how do they "prime the pump" and get students interested in their companies?
For the last seven years, 3M has had a commitment with the Minnesota Association of Black Lawyers (MABL) that entails placing one of its students each year in 3M's legal department as a summer intern. "It's been a great way to establish familiarity with MABL and raise our visibility among MABL members, so when we hire people three to five years out, it won't be the first time they've heard of 3M," says Otterstetter. "We've also worked to establish a connection with the Minnesota Hispanic Bar Association to reach out to their members to make them aware of our company and to get to know them."
3M lawyers also reach out to the broader community. They frequently participate in career days at the local law schools and, most recently, presented to a group of high school juniors from diverse backgrounds in the nationally known Leadership Education and Development (LEAD) program. A number of 3M lawyers also are active in mentoring programs for women and minority lawyers in the Twin Cities.
3M has been working to build a connection with the Twin Cities' law schools. "One of the objectives is to increase the number of minority law students at those schools," says Ziegler. "In turn, they are ultimately feeding law schools to our office. This should improve the number of minority lawyers in the community."
FedEx also hires interns and tracks their careers. "We hire a diverse group of interns and we keep an eye on them after law school," says Lewis Lensing. "Hopefully, when they gain experience, they'll come back."
Intel's approach involves reaching students even earlier than law school. "I've addressed Sacramento High School's law and public policy portion of their school on a couple of occasions," says Faatz. "I tell them what it's like to be an attorney and hopefully give them the sense that it's something they could do."
Intel is also working with the California State Bar on its pipeline project, which includes an effort to compile a list of best diversity practices, extending up and down the pipeline. Its lawyers often participate in local and national diversity-related events that attract law students to encourage them to consider careers in IP. Last year, they addressed law students at Microsoft's Law Student Intellectual Property Summit.
Inclusiveness Within the Company
Once attorneys are hired, most of the firms have specific programs for their diverse employees.
FedEx has a vice president's Diversity Council, which sponsors multicultural forums to which all employees are encouraged to attend. Building on their informal mentoring, many officers and directors informally mentor women and minorities in the Legal Department, and FedEx is about to launch a formal mentoring program for women that will include minority women.
FedEx Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary Christine Richards sits with all reporting departments on a regular basis. In fact, several years ago, Richards started an initiative with minority leaders in various departments, including the legal department, identifying diverse employees with outstanding leadership skills. Later, this diverse group was tasked with developing strategies on how to increase FedEx's pool of diverse applicants. All of FedEx's managing directors and vice presidents have had either a three- or five-day diversity training course. The sessions are conducted in a classroom setting with employees from around the world, representing different nationalities, races, and genders. "Almost everyone, no matter how dedicated to diversity he or she already was, reports coming away with new insight," says Lewis Lensing of FedEx. Why? "Because for three or five days, depending on the course each takes, he or she is only concentrating on diversity with a group of people from many different ethnic and racial backgrounds."
This year, for the first time, FedEx will give diversity awards to selected employees, and according to Lewis Lensing, one of the nominations will come from its legal department.
Michael Dai of 3M is pleased with his legal department's Diversity Committee, now in its third year. "The Diversity Committee is active, vibrant, and a grass roots organization, not mandated from the top down," says Dai. "People who are deeply committed to diversity issues voluntarily came together to discuss, act on, and create a forum to promote and support an inclusive environment." Currently, the committee consists of 40 lawyers, paralegals, and other legal staff and has four subcommittees: Outside Counsel, Recruiting, Communications, and Education and Retention. The Communications and Education subcommittee, for example, has several programs, including profiles of individuals within Legal Affairs who are willing to share their life stories to provide insight and encouragement to other employees. These stories appear on a web-based interface to which Legal Affairs personnel sign on every day when they arrive at work.
The Minnesota Bar requires its lawyers to take a number of hours of classes on eliminating bias in the legal arena. The 3M Diversity Committee recently co-sponsored a two-hour diversity seminar, which blended theater, music, expert commentary, and film. Both informative and engaging, and eligible for the state bar's continuing legal education credit hours, the seminar drew several hundred attendees and was opened to peer companies in the Twin Cities area, including General Mills, Cargill, and Best Buy.
Intel has a similar program with its affinity groups. "These groups have a variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, along with different interests," says Faatz. "We do a lot of training on inclusiveness and have a program called 'Micro Inequities.' We educate on how people communicate and how to be sensitive to the communication styles. In the legal department, we have a goal to have 100 percent of our department trained in these classes by the end of the year," adds Faatz.
Honeywell relies mainly on its career development process, which tracks and guides all employees. "We don't single out any of our diverse employees for special treatment; we subject them to the same hiring criteria and treat them the same way in our career development process," says Kreindler. "We respect the rights and needs of all of our employees. In turn, our employees respect the company and enjoy coming to a positive work environment every day."
Inside/Outside Counsel
All of the companies stated their interest in using minorities and women as outside counsel. Many of them signed the "Call to Action" initiated by Sara Lee General Counsel Roderick Palmore, and have specific outside counsel guidelines. FedEx handles most litigation, contracts, tax, securities, regula-tory, labor, and other work in-house. However, when the department does use outside attorneys, it seeks a diverse group of attorneys.
"We're working on a letter which will be sent to the firms about their minority numbers," says Lewis Lensing. "We want to know more about who the associates and partners are as far as diversity. In this letter, we're stating our interest in diversity, promoting it to our outside counsel, and encouraging them to hire and maintain a diverse workforce." The patent department of Intel always asks outside firms about their diversity efforts, including the promotion and advancement of diverse attorneys. Also a signatory of the Call to Action, Intel plans to expand its efforts by officially informing outside firms about how important inclusiveness is to the department.
Last year, Intel implemented the Associate Clerkship Program for outside firms with which it already had a relationship. Intel attorneys encourage associates at those firms who have three to five years of experience to apply. These associates come in-house to Intel for six to 12 months and become Intel employees.
"They see how we do our work in-house and essentially they become their firm's expert on Intel," says Faatz. "We encourage minorities and women to apply, and it's another way to encourage them to work on Intel matters at their firm."
Diversity Means a Better Workforce
All of the law departments indicated that inclusiveness is important when working on an international scale and in a global marketplace. Having employees of various backgrounds and experiences helps the companies develop better products that reach their diverse customer base. The law departments find that attorneys enjoy working with people who have various cultural experiences and that it leads to more individual and team contributions. These companies take inclusiveness seriously and work hard to improve their numbers.
Kreindler of Honeywell emphasizes that diversity makes the company more successful in dealing with its customers and creates a more satisfied workforce that benefits the company in countless ways. Kreindler feels that the more success they have building diversity, the more individuals will know that Honeywell is a company that believes in inclusiveness.
Intel trains its employees on the benefits of inclusiveness and stresses that a diverse population can be promoted. "If women and minorities don't see role models in the higher positions, they may not feel empowered to achieve the higher ranks in the company," says Faatz. "In that respect, our mentoring program is very good."
3M's Ziegler states, "The chief reason diversity in the law department is important is that it makes us better. Having lawyers from diverse backgrounds not only helps us to better represent our diverse client organization, it makes this a richer and more vibrant practice to live and work."
Lewis Lensing of FedEx agrees. "We think FedEx's employees represent a rich, cultural tapestry from which we all gain. Being able to work in an atmosphere where people have diverse backgrounds is invaluable."
Kathleen Dreessen is a freelance writer based in Napa, Calif.
From the September/October 2006 issue of Diversity & The Bar®