It was good to see major Canadian corporations pronouncing their commitments to promoting diversity in the legal profession recently.
As Law Times
reported online last week, 40 Canadian general counsel came together to launch Legal Leaders for Diversity and Inclusiveness this month.
Those who sign pledge to reach out to their peers and urge them to commit to building a diversity plan, offering diversity coaching as part of their corporation’s leadership training, and putting diversity progress on the quarterly agenda.
The commitment also extends to using law firms and suppliers that are either minority-owned or reflect a commitment to diversity. In-house lawyers, particularly those at big companies, are some of the biggest clients of legal services, so they have significant clout in the larger community.
The move is a welcome sign of progress, but as Joy Casey, co-founder of A Call to Action Canada, points out, the new efforts lack the teeth her organization pledges.
“To me, it’s fundamental,” she says, noting she believes outside law firms that fail to make progress on diversity should face consequences by losing out on corporate legal work.
So far, A Call to Action has seven signatories, and Casey notes “the concern that’s been expressed is the issue of teeth.”
So while the Legal Leaders pledge is welcome, it’s clear that the profession has more to do. It’s notable that while there certainly was a Canadian presence at A Call to Action Canada’s conference in Toronto on May 17, there was a very large contingent of U.S. companies, lawyers, and organizations.
Casey rightly points out that that’s largely due to the fact that A Call to Action Canada has tended to rely on the support of its U.S. counterpart organization, but that just shows how far behind Canada’s legal profession has been.
In fact, one of the speakers at the conference, Ratna Omidvar of the Maytree Foundation, spoke of the DiverseCity research project’s recent study on diversity in the legal profession here.
While she said she couldn’t reveal the full findings, she noted: “I can tell you that there’s lots of room for improvement.”
So, the legal profession and the companies that use lawyers’ services have further to go in diversifying. Will change come from altering firms’ hiring criteria to emphasize things like cultural competency?
That should help. But as with many things, little changes unless people and organizations have to. As a result, pledges and statements about diversity are nice but they aren’t enough unless they come with a way to enforce them. Let’s hope, then, that companies move beyond the Legal Leaders effort.
— Glenn Kauth
