Christopher C. Mansfield
General Counsel
At Liberty Mutual, diversity initiatives are designed to involve all employees among the approximately 200 employees in the home office, and more than 1450 employees in approximately 65 field offices. Senior Vice President and General Counsel Christopher Mansfield leads the legal department in a comprehensive diversity plan that he initiated five years ago. The first step of the plan provided a diversity consultant to conduct awareness training to all managers, enabling them to conduct diversity awareness training for their respective staff.
The legal department’s diversity plan initiatives include: requiring mentoring for all new employees; developing a resource guide to assist managers in diversifying the pool of candidates when selecting for open legal positions; developing a diversity library; requiring office diversity activities; and participating in the Inroads program, among others.
The initiatives create an overall diversity program that allows the legal department to increase the diversification of staff through recruitment, improve the retention rates, enhance effectiveness with customers, increase the understanding of diversity among staff, and foster a working environment that reflects and embraces diversity.
The legal department also directly ties compensation to goal attainment. Diversity is a goal for all managers within the legal department, including senior officers. Achievement of diversity goals is factored into performance ratings and compensation increases.
It is clear that Liberty Mutual is a true leader in setting the pace for diversity.
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From the March 2002 issue of Diversity & The Bar®