Category: Interviews

Here in the US, the legal profession is among the least diverse of comparable white-collar professions. It should be the most. The law is supposed to be about justice, equality and opportunity and I think lawyers are particularly attuned to those concepts. It’s in the nature of their training and the work that they do.

However, historically, the law as a whole has been very slow to change – not just in the area of diversity and inclusion. Lawyers and legal employers are often cautious by nature. They can be more tentative to embrace change and feel more comfortable with the status quo, and I think that’s reflected in where the law sits with diversity and inclusion. There are a lot of legacy barriers and impediments that have not yet been fully addressed or eradicated, which the profession as a whole needs to continue to work against. We’d often prefer to rely on precedent, both in our case law analysis and in how we lead, manage and operate.

We’re at a place where women represent about half of all law school graduates, but they represent only about 23% of law firm partners, 19% of equity partners, 30% of Fortune 500 general counsel and 30% or so of federal district court judges. The numbers just aren’t up there yet. The category of things that still require change are those like unconscious bias, not enough mentorship or sponsorship opportunities, less recognition than should be provided, and fewer leadership opportunities. These are all things that we are very conscious of, are working against, and trying to resolve.

I believe very strongly in diversity and inclusion, not least because our Law Division is very much a human capital function. We don’t have a product, all we have is great people delivering advice and counseling our clients – and to do that well we really need diverse talent to bring diverse perspectives to the work.

As the leader, it’s very important that I am personally invested in this subject, that I speak to it regularly, and that I am very engaged and involved in the work we are doing. Various studies have shown that one of the single biggest differentiating factors as to whether diversity and inclusion programs succeed is the amount of time spent by the leader – whether that is the CEO at corporate level, or the general counsel at legal department level. So I invest a lot of myself and my time in this work.

We have a diversity and inclusion council that helps guide our efforts: a cross-functional group of professionals from across the legal department that looks at various issues and makes recommendations, and shares our work both inside our company and outside. We also have an individual diversity champion, who acts as a liaison between the legal department and bank-wide diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. We have a mentorship program that we are expanding and that is focused, initially, on professionals of color.

We’ve developed a ‘Spotlight on Talent’ program, which gives early-career women and diverse lawyers from outside law firms the opportunity to learn more about U.S. Bank, meet with us and present educational content to our entire legal department. We can then see first-hand how capable they are and begin to develop relationships to help sustain them for growth and development in their careers. We invite law firms to bid on this opportunity, and have conducted five sessions, with a sixth planned for this fall. The program has been very successful, to the extent that one law firm asked if they could recommend it to other clients. We, of course, readily agreed.

We look at demographic data that relates to our department to show how we are doing against our goals and objectives. Candidly, we have historically over-performed on gender diversity, but are not yet where we’d like to be with professionals of color, so that’s been a big emphasis and area of focus for us. Several elements of our diversity and inclusion initiatives have goals, so we look at those regularly and try to measure ourselves against what we set out to do. We also try to benchmark ourselves against what is going on in the broader profession and also, importantly, with other corporate legal departments. We’re involved in a number of groups and organizations that talk about this topic very regularly, and we compare notes and share ideas.

We approach diversity and inclusion work from the perspective that there is not necessarily an end goal; we are never going to be completely done with it as a constant work in progress. We’re always trying to do better to improve, achieve and accomplish our overall objectives, so we have to be eternally vigilant about the subject. It’s unlike the more traditional financial measurements or other data we might look at. There’s not some day out there in the future, whether it’s a month, a year or three years from now, where I’m going to say ‘We’re all done with this topic, and we can move on to something else.’

We are continually learning and trying to add new things, or get rid of elements we don’t think are working for us. One example would be related to recruiting. We have some specific recruitment guidelines that we use, so there is a lot of emphasis on diversity as we recruit. But previously, we were not always disciplined about a process for recruiting new lawyers, and relied significantly on word of mouth, referrals and people we knew. Not surprisingly, that approach didn’t produce sufficiently diverse candidate pools for us. We’ve since stopped that, and now have a more disciplined approach. For example, we created recruiting guidelines and require at least one diverse candidate for each open position, encourage searches outside of traditional geographies, and require panel interviews and consistent interview questions. We also work closely with affinity bar organizations for sourcing candidates.

There is both tension and collaboration between the in-house and law firm world, and people have different views on the degree to which in-house departments should be trying to drive diversity with our law firm partners and providers. I feel strongly that we have a unique opportunity to do so, and we use it to the benefit of the broader profession. We are very focused on the Mansfield Rule, which requires organizations to commit to considering diverse candidates in recruiting, developing and promoting people into leadership. The first version of Mansfield focused on law firms, which could voluntarily commit to the program and ultimately become certified. The in-house version just rolled out, and we were one of the first companies to agree and sign on – we’re very proud to be on the leading edge of that. We’ve since taken things a step further, and have actually asked about 40 of our leading law firms to formally commit to the Mansfield Rule. We’ve really challenged them to take this journey with us; in no small part because we view our law firms very much as an extension of our own in-house legal department.

At this moment in time, financial services is undergoing a dramatic transformation in terms of what types of products and services it provides, and how customers can access those. There is a lot happening with technology and innovation in banking and financial services – probably the best example is mobile banking. Our company, like a lot of companies and banks, is investing heavily in technology and innovation, while working hard to figure out what the future looks like and how to create that future.

To me, diversity is critically important to innovation. In many respects, I think it can help unlock innovation, and so although it’s important and critical to what we do, it’s that much more important in this broader environment of innovation that we’re operating in. We’re in something of a unique moment in time: while historically the law has been slow to change, globalization and technology are ascending, which is driving disruption and innovation in how legal services are provided. This change brings opportunity; the law has a tremendous chance now, in this moment, to rededicate itself and leverage the diverse talent we already have and focus anew on retention, development and promotion into leadership. The problem is not with diverse lawyers, it’s with the legacy structures, systems and behaviors that have made their path in the law uniquely difficult, and stood in the way of full equality.

It bothered me that we didn’t have any kind of support for women, so we started in 2012 by holding a summit in Chicago for the top 125 women at the company – not just lawyers – and we brought in high-profile speakers like the attorney general of Illinois who, at the time, was a female. We had a great program, and it kicked off a three-pronged women’s leadership approach: annual summits – which also included regional summits where we got deeper into the organization with more junior women – a women’s mentoring program, and a women’s employee resource group.

As I started working with women on those programs, one of my close friends became the President of the American Bar Association, and she asked me to participate in the Commission on Women in the Profession. It was through my involvement in that that I actually started to really understand the various ways to manage outside counsel and inside counsel in a way that advances diversity.

When we started this women’s leadership program, of course, I tried to get as many of the women within my department involved, although there was competition with women from throughout the whole company. But within the department, I really tried to make it clear that a person’s diversity of any sort should not in any way impede their ability to influence or participate in activities – and so it was really about leadership and sending the right message from the top.

At the same time, I looked at our outside firms and recognized that there is ‘power of the purse strings’. That being able to choose comes with the ability to ask for things that maybe firms wouldn’t otherwise do. So every year we assess our preferred provider program, and we evaluate business-related aspects of their performance. I started adding in (and this was something that I’d learned through the Commission on Women in the Profession) factors related to diversity – so we would ask the firms every year to provide us diversity statistics for the firm as a whole and for the team that supported us, and I also ask about succession planning: when the relationship partner is retired, who are you training to take over for this business? I make sure that, to the extent possible, client service teams for every matter are diverse.

One thing that I’ve always known is, if you ask people for this kind of information, they are really going to focus on it, and if you don’t ask, then they don’t think about it. So we collect this data, put it in a table every year, and plot it over multiple years. And when the leadership of the client service team, the relationship manager, comes in every year to visit during our annual review, these firms are concerned if their numbers didn’t improve firm-wide and client service team-wide.

It’s funny – the smallest firm in our preferred provider program, which is an 11-person firm, takes it the most seriously, and that was interesting to me. We have lots of conversations with the firms about what we expect, and I see that there is a greater effort to bring women into the teams. I actually even ask questions about compensation and who is getting billing credits – so it goes all the way down; it is a complete discussion. I think it creates a clear expectation on my part and it creates some good conversations, and I think it makes people make changes in how they do things.

The women’s leadership program evolved into a broader diversity program – including ethnic diversity. The CEO asked me to be the executive inclusion and diversity champion for the company – which was great, because I was excited about being able to do more.

Being able to take that role enabled me to push some issues. We expanded the program; we have so many more employee resource groups now than we ever did before – we have Women, Hispanics, African Americans, Veterans, Multi-generational, and Pan-Asian groups. And the last one we created, which I’m really proud about, and of which l’m the executive sponsor, is NiPride – our LGBTQ employee resource group. That was a really big deal.

I think being a woman is what influenced my work in this area. I don’t think being a lawyer is what matters; I think it’s being in a senior leadership role that gives you gravitas and authority, and people listen. You don’t realize how much people listen until you talk about difficult issues, and you get people to listen, and then to follow. People care a lot, but there’s also an element of having the courage to pursue it. It’s really easy to have a passion; it’s also easy to say ‘Well, they said I couldn’t do it’, or ‘They told me no’. You’ve got to have the courage to challenge pre-existing ideas and to move forward, even when it’s not necessarily the popular approach.

One of the biggest mistakes that I made in the beginning was not recognizing that in order to have an effective inclusion and diversity program, you cannot exclude the men – you have got to include women, men, everybody, because otherwise you’re talking to yourself and to the people who already get it. You need to be talking to everybody about the issues, because women alone can’t solve the problem. It’s got to be a conversation with everybody.

One of the things we found when we had the women’s leadership program, was that the men thought we were just going out and having fun, or drinking tea. We had serious, business-focused programming to develop the women based on various issues that they were concerned about at the time – but the men don’t know unless we tell them, right? And that’s the whole point: to let everybody know about the things that are of concern and work together on those issues. We want men to be mentors as well as women. Where does the power lie? The power lies in the people that are at the top and the numbers show that most of them are not women. So if you limit it to just women mentors, then you’d basically be diminishing the value of the program from the outset. It’s about being open and talking about it from the executive level down – and that includes both men and women talking about the issues and supporting what we’re doing.

We have to look outside – if we don’t, we’ll always be getting the same answer. I think it’s important to know what’s going on outside of our company, otherwise we will never make a change, or we might not make the best change. I think it is helpful to have consultants – you bring in outside firms for legal work when they have specialty areas that you don’t have in-house. Even though we have a small inclusion and diversity team at the company, obviously they can’t be up on everything, so I think it is important to have outside help, to know what’s going on and to really understand everything before we make changes – and to understand what changes we should make.

This can never be about just work-life balance issues. If you start doing programs that are founded on addressing those kinds of issues, they’re going to be viewed as trite, as not substantive and not helping the business. You’ve got to show that what you’re doing is going to help meet the business goals and achieve our business objectives. That’s why I’ve always insisted on having really substantive, meaty, development- and business-focused topics for any of the programming we do, and for any of the support that we provide. For example, there was a point maybe eight, nine or ten years ago where the big focus of the company was execution – that was the mantra of the CEO at the time. So our programming was about how to execute. We had speakers on execution for women, how women have challenges in executing compared to men, and so it was about tying the programming to the goals and the needs of the business at the time. You need to have it clear to everybody that it’s all about meeting the needs of the business, it’s not about benefitting women just for women’s sake.

At Kellogg Company, I serve on the executive diversity and inclusion council, the global legal and compliance department’s leadership team and I also lead the global ethics and compliance function. I serve as the head of the people team within the legal and compliance function, advising on global D&I issues, and am also the former executive sponsor of K Pride and Allies – Kellogg’s business/employee resource group (B/ERG) dedicated to LGBTQIA employees and their allies.

In the wider profession, I collaborate with external law firms that are passionate about diversity and inclusion. I serve on the board for the LGBT Bar Association and the board of trustees for the National Judicial College, which educates and inspires the judiciary on topics including diversity and inclusion.

At Kellogg, we know that people are our competitive advantage and we know we must nurture a diverse, inclusive environment in which all our people are empowered to bring their authentic ‘whole selves’ to work and achieve their full potential. Our focus on diversity enables us to build a culture where all employees are inspired to share their passion, talents and ideas. They become part of a team that works to better serve the needs of our diverse consumers by delivering fresh thinking, product innovations and quality brands.

Our legal and compliance team helps to advise the company on how to create a diverse and inclusive environment, so it’s essential that we’re leaders and role models in supporting, developing and growing diverse talent. It’s a competency that demands time, attention and leadership. The team is a testament to our ability to lead, as we are incredibly diverse – our leadership team is roughly 60% male and 40% female, and 50% of the team is a racial minority. We are also inclusive of other dimensions of diversity, including LGBTQIA people and persons with disabilities.

We are very intentional about developing and supporting an environment that fosters inclusion and a sense of belonging for all. We want to be a high-performing team, and that starts with trust. Trust is about confidence in your team members, assuming positive intent, and being open to being vulnerable and learning together. To me, it makes a personal difference to be able to bring my whole self to work, so I strive to ensure that others can do the same. We are very intentional about varying facets of diversity and factor this in as we aim to ensure everyone has the chance to speak and be heard.

We have a variety of companywide diversity and inclusion initiatives. For example, our Kellogg executive diversity and inclusion council (EDIC) is chaired and actively led by our chairman and CEO, Steve Cahillane. The council meets at least quarterly to review workforce data including representation, hiring, promotions and turnover data, by gender, race/ethnicity, people with disabilities and veterans. EDIC is comprised of all global function heads, ensuring that diversity and inclusion considerations filter into each functional area.

We also have eight B/ERGs, three of which have global chapters. Each B/ERG is dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce within the context of our company’s mission, values and business objectives. These help to create an environment of inclusion and belonging, enabling our employees to bring their authentic selves to work and achieve their full potential. The B/ERGs also work in innovative ways to share their valuable insights to positively and strategically achieve our business goals and objectives.

The company provides training around the topics of unconscious bias, gender speak and microaggression to help ensure our leaders are aware of how their personal experiences can impact talent decisions.

At Kellogg, our legal team leads and influences the diversity and inclusion strategy, but is only one voice in this space. It all starts with us modeling diversity and inclusion in our department and advising on what has worked for us. One of the initiatives of which we’re very proud is our collaboration with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Law Fellow program. During this summer program – in partnership with the NAACP – students travel to Kellogg headquarters for an immersion in Kellogg’s culture and legal practices, and for exposure and interaction with many of our executive leaders.

I think it’s absolutely critical for outside legal service providers to be diverse and inclusive. If I’m receiving advice on how to manage employment and diversity issues, I want to be assured that it’s effective advice, and I want to see the providers demonstrate that they believe in their counsel.

At Kellogg, accountability for diversity and inclusion starts at the top. Annually, we provide an update for our board of directors that includes our workforce metrics, movement and qualitative efforts to drive improvement, and our board is actively engaged in our diversity and inclusion agenda.

At the B/ERG level, success is measured through our global opinion survey, which is administered to all employees, as well as through key performance indicators such as community service contributions and business impact.

Within the legal department, we monitor our strategies to see if they are working – we have an expert in data analytics who measures our work within the company and our own department to determine success and impact. We also benchmark ourselves against other companies. And, while we continue to do well in this space, we always strive to do better.

We find value in benchmarking best practices among competitors, as well as companies with world-class D&I programs. This helps us to stay at the forefront of the diversity and inclusion conversation. When reviewing these best practices, we discuss what works and how we can make it even better. Innovation is a core competency at Kellogg and we carry it into everything we do, including determining innovative ways to integrate diversity and inclusion practices throughout our organization.

Throughout our journey, we’ve learned that providing training on diversity topics is not enough. We need to focus on creating an environment where employees feel included, can develop a true sense of belonging and feel comfortable bringing their authentic selves to work. We understand that this can only be achieved by creating a culture of trust, driven by leaders who are visible champions of inclusion. Employees have confidence in leaders who take the time to know them as individuals.

The Rooney Rule is used in the football arena to make sure that when NFL teams are hiring professional staff supporting sports teams, they have some diversity options. An organization called Diversity Lab has developed something called the Mansfield Rule – a spin-off from the Rooney Rule – which is a framework to make sure that as you’re considering new talent to promote or to attract laterally, you ensure the people being considered represent the population as a whole, or represent a significant level of diversity. The format that takes is to make sure that 30% of the candidates you are screening, and 30% of the candidates that you’re bringing in to interview are diverse. We use the Mansfield Rule very heavily for recruiting, retention and promotion, including recruitment of outside counsel.

We participate in local initiatives – we’re part of the Law in Technology Diversity Collaborative, which is a collaborative of seven companies in the Bay Area that recruit diverse summer interns. These are people who law firms, for whatever reason, have not recruited from law schools but who are incredible superstars. Each company partners with a law firm. We host the intern for five weeks each, with the idea that they then have both technology company and big-name law firm experience. The hope is that they can get an offer from the law firm at the end of the summer, which is a real jump-start to their career, particularly for diverse and exceptional students who have been left on the outside by law firms in the campus recruitment process.

In the legal team, we are very focused on our own initiatives. The Law in Technology Diversity Collaborative is a legal-only collaborative, and so is the Mansfield Rule. Where we lean on the company-wide initiatives are in elimination of bias training, mentorship opportunities, affinity group memberships and meetings – we have a women’s internal network that meets fairly often and finds initiatives, so it’s a nice pairing. We hold hands with the company-wide initiatives, but we are very focused in our own group on making things happen just for the lawyers and legal staff.

As a general matter, we rely very heavily on internal elimination of bias training, to make sure that people are aware of their own biases. Unfortunately, people tend to interview for people who look like them or remind them of themselves, so we try to raise awareness of that fact in a way where people don’t feel defensive, but have some awareness of their own contours.

Honestly, it’s a really fine balance between token diversity and looking around and understanding if we’ve been successful, because we all have a unique upbringing and story, and we don’t want to discount people’s humanity. But we also want to advance and promote traditional diversity here; finding, promoting and retaining women leaders is one of our top corporate goals and so we have company-wide and group-based metrics where we look at the percentage of women in each position, the percentage of fallout year over year from each level, and people in the pipeline. We have internal development programs that we send high-performing women and other diverse talent to, and we have an equal pay study going on. We look at the numbers, we understand who is at what level by ethnicity and gender and where we have gaps, and then we try and fill those gaps based on precise outreach.

D&I efforts are such important, complex initiatives. Of course, ‘diversity and inclusion’ is easy to say out loud, but each person is a complex set of circumstances. I have two young kids, and I’m very aware that when you have a young kid, it’s a tough thing to figure out how you do your work and pick them up from school. Figuring out how to accommodate different life stages and demands in order to make the workplace welcoming and accommodating to all forms of talent is critical. The learning curve is steep, and that’s one of the reasons I’m very appreciative of the support of Diversity Lab and others to help us climb that curve. Diversity Lab certifies outside counsel as Mansfield-compliant – which means that the outside law firms are considering 30% diverse candidates for partners, track and for lateral hires, etc. If you get the certification, then you get to come to a conference with in-house counsel. And it means that we can rely on that certification to know that, in hiring, we’re promoting and living our own corporate and personal values.

Diversity Lab creates many forums for senior lawyers to get together and share tips and tricks. For example, if you have pumping rooms at work with hospital-grade pumps, that is something that tends to promote women returning to work – and staying once they have returned. Having some flexibility in job scheduling, job sharing, extended maternity leave, Milk Stork – these are things that support moms.

You can promote diversity in outside counsel through either financial incentives or financial penalties, or through simply asking a lot of questions to determine how credit is allocated at the firm and who is financially rewarded for bringing in and/or doing your work. Promoting diversity and inclusion outside our organization is as much of a concern for us, so we ask a lot of questions when trying to hire for our matters; asking about matter credits is a sign that you care about where your money goes and that its path reflects your values.

If you have the right culture in legal, then it tends to be a group of people that are listened to within a company. Legal teams are in a position of strength to lead by example, because people do listen and I think it can have significant weight – so using that for good, and to express strong corporate values is really worthwhile. So, talking about it, but also leading by example, is important, and also offering easy ways to do it. The Mansfield Rule makes it really easy: you just don’t bring candidates onsite for interviews until 30% of the pool (or more) is diverse. The hiring manager has to be disciplined enough to say, ‘We’re not ready to bring people onsite; these are the metrics that we are trying to meet in diversity, we are not yet ready to take action in hiring because we haven’t been able to consider the things we are committed to considering.’ Essentially, you have to commit to not letting the urgent overwhelm the important. Hiring is always urgent but doing it to reflect your values is critical.

Fintech tends to be very dominated by men at the executive leadership level. In my case, I didn’t think about it; I followed my nose to what was interesting. When I left my law firm, I joined a fintech start-up that was run by two women, and then my next general counsel was a woman, so I think I’ve had a little bit of an anomaly of an experience where I’ve had women around me in an otherwise male-dominated industry.

I think that there are a lot of people that are incredibly focused on this and think it is a really urgent issue. I also look around and notice, particularly in fintech, that there are very few senior female lawyers by percentage, so something is being lost between A and B. But,in my experience, people think this is an urgent issue.

I think you see a desire to have more women in senior roles in legal and also across the board in fintech, and what I’ve come to realize is that in legal – like finance, like marketing, like engineering – the need is to prepare and promote women to leadership. And because legal is a service function, there has to be a business need for a leader, so the business has to recognize women as those leaders. And you can generate a bit of inertia: because women may show the same biases that we’ve been talking about, in that they tend to recognize talent that reminds them of themselves, one of the good things is that if you have more women senior leaders, you get more women senior leaders. If you have more diverse senior leaders, you get more diverse senior leaders – because they can and do recognize talent that might otherwise go unnoticed.

My goal has been to lift while we climb: essentially, to help other women who are really successful, smart, leaders and make sure that they, in their groups, are having opportunities. To advocate for them and point out – in meetings, at events, in emails, everywhere – how great their work is and what an impact they are having on a project or a team or the company or culture – to make sure that people are seeing them as senior leaders.

I often try to go to women-owned staffing businesses when we’re sourcing contractors. Any time you’re spending money, you can spend it in accordance with your values, and I keep that in mind with individual people and with service providers. There’s plenty out there that can satisfy what you’re looking for, and I think a rising tide floats all boats.

In February 2019, I stepped down from my position as general counsel of Ingredion after 22 years. I had a wonderful career – it’s a great company, I can’t say enough positive things about it – but 22 years is a long time. The previous year, I had taken a continuing legal education program on mental health, largely because it’s now a requirement in Illinois to maintain your bar license. The program I chose was on burnout and, as I was listening, I started to recognize a lot of these symptoms in myself: feeling continually overwhelmed, having a lack of patience and energy to connect with others, and physical symptoms including headaches and not sleeping well. I realized that I desperately needed a change. I knew I was under stress. I knew I had anxiety – I guess I just didn’t realize it was a problem. I hadn’t stepped back and taken a look at all of these disparate symptoms and said: hey, there’s something more here.

For a long time, those of us in the law thought of mental health issues as being limited to drug addiction or alcohol abuse. We didn’t realize there was so much more to mental health. And people didn’t speak about these issues – except maybe with their very close friends – for fear of being judged, losing their jobs or not being seen as good enough to continue practising law. I realized that, right now, we need to be able to speak openly about mental health. Storytelling is very important – people using their own voices and talking about their own experiences.

There’s a landmark study called the ABA Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation Study. It was completed in 2016, and it surveyed 15,000 attorneys in 19 states, all currently employed in the legal profession. 21% self-identified as having difficulties with alcohol, 28% self-identified as struggling with depression and 19% indicated that they demonstrated symptoms of anxiety. What’s scary is 11.5% had considered suicide. Younger attorneys in the first ten years of practice reported a higher incidence of these problems, and that’s a change, because earlier studies showed this as more of a ‘later-in-career’ problem. The study showed that attorneys in the United States had higher rates of drinking and mental health issues than in other high-stress professions. Lawyers working in law firms have the highest rates of alcohol abuse, and law students drink more alcohol and have higher rates of anxiety than their non-law peers.

There are a lot of factors at play. Law is a hard profession; it’s stressful, you work long hours, and you give a lot of yourself personally. Many lawyers are ‘type A’ personalities and we are driven to win, both personally and on behalf of our clients. We are taught to look for risk in every situation, and even in our personal lives we spend time looking for what can go wrong. Many of us have very high personal standards of performance and, for many of us, particularly in law firms, long hours can be seen as a proxy for both devotion and success. There is a fear that admitting to vulnerability of any kind can be career limiting. There’s also a perception that there is some ideal model of what a lawyer should look like, and I think that’s even more true in the big law firms. That model is not a true reflection of who a lot of people are – in addition to creating mental health stressors, perhaps this hits our diverse lawyers even harder.

I think one thing that needs to improve is our storytelling – the ability for people to speak out and say: ‘This is my experience and I’m still a good lawyer’. Flextime, alternative career paths, use of technology in the work environment – these are all partial answers. But the biggest piece is really to remove the stigma around the topic of mental health and bring it into the light of day. The next generation of lawyers needs to know they are not alone, and that it’s acceptable to make their own wellness a priority. It could be through individual actions like meditation, yoga, fitness and personal care. But I think, particularly with younger employees coming into the workforce, people are realizing that a stressed out, burnt-out workforce is not going to be competitive in the future. People should be incentivized – or at least disincentivized – for behaviors that are not sustainable in the long term. You need to remember that a legal career is a long-term play – it’s not about how many hours you can bill this year.

I think younger workers are using their feet to demand better working environments. Younger employees don’t expect to work for an employer for 20 years – they expect to work at multiple different companies and in different industries throughout their career, and perhaps even change their professional focus. If they are in a work environment they don’t like, they’re going to leave. They feel perfectly free to try something new. Work environments that acknowledge and cater to the whole person will win the war for talent.

I also think we need to make sure that our professional interactions, our networking events and our social interactions, are comfortable for everyone. There are a whole host of diversity topics here, but alcohol plays a key part in the mental health arena. Alcohol does not need to be served in order to have a social or networking event. I think the younger generation would appreciate that from us. I sit on the board of trustees of a law school and I’ve heard law students in the student lounge complaining about this – they want to go and meet lawyers and learn about the profession. They don’t want to drink. They don’t want to see alcohol at every event.

As a workforce, we are seeing people in their 40s and 50s who are really struggling with mental health issues and who are realizing, perhaps based on the good example that our younger employees provide, that it’s alright to talk about things.

The legal profession agrees. The ABA model rule recommends that lawyers earn one continuing legal education credit hour in mental health or substance abuse disorders every three years, as well as one hour of diversity and inclusion programming. States are not required to do this, but Illinois adopted this recommendation, and it’s definitely a growing trend. In part, Illinois did so because people didn’t take these courses despite them always being available. There was a perception that taking a mental health program could reflect negatively on the attorney, or that they were only for people with a drug or alcohol problem. In Illinois, we also have the Lawyers’ Assistance Program (many states have something similar), which is a free scheme providing help for lawyers experiencing mental health issues. The continuing legal education requirement helps publicize the available resources, so that more attorneys know they can get support.

More experienced lawyers also need to help law students, younger lawyers, and the non-lawyer professionals around us feel comfortable talking about these issues and finding help. Even if it’s something that seems trivial, like burnout: to speak about it, to realize it’s important, to get help, to make change – these can all serve to remove the stigma and create the sense that seeking help doesn’t mean someone has a problem, it just means they are taking care of themselves.

I think that when we talk about the war for talent, companies and law firms need to take care of their existing talent. I think the greatest compliment that can be paid to a general counsel, or any leader, is when a member of their team becomes a general counsel somewhere else, or takes a promotion somewhere else, because that general counsel or leader helped create a safe place for them to grow, professionally and personally.

I recently completed the National Diversity Council’s DiversityFirst certification program. I saw diversity and inclusion gaining stature as a profession, not just a function of human resources, similar to the relationship of the legal department and compliance a decade ago. I felt like training in this area has been way too slow in coming – and it’s been limited to human resources professionals. The continuing legal education courses I attended on this topic didn’t go deep enough. I wanted to go beyond ‘diversity is good’ and really talk about practical ways to create an inclusive environment and to be an inclusive leader.

I feel we are at an interesting intersection of the law and D&I. In the past, lawyers counseled our clients to be color blind. Knowing too much about employees’ personal lives can lead to employment discrimination claims, particularly in the event of an unrelated performance action or a cost-based restructuring. We struggled as lawyers when clients wanted to have metrics or quantitative data about diversity, for fear this information could be used in litigation. But D&I really requires us to embrace differences and be able to talk about them openly – and I think we all agree that if you don’t measure in some way, diversity doesn’t happen. The old way of counseling our clients just doesn’t fit the workplace of today or of tomorrow. We need to be thinking about what workplace interactions will look like in this very inclusive employment environment. How do we get there today, without increasing our risk of employment litigation? For a lot of companies, that is a big concern, but one that can be overcome as we embrace and create inclusive workplaces, with a focus on the employee as a unique individual, while we all learn how to speak openly about mental health and diversity issues.

SoundCloud’s mission is to give people the power to share and connect through music. The platform’s community of creators and listeners are a young and an incredibly diverse group, and we work hard to ensure our employees reflect this diversity as well. SoundCloud approaches diversity as fundamental to our business strategy, not a secondary part of our HR function, because a diverse workforce enriches and adds real business value in terms of our company and the platform.

As general counsel, I proactively recruit and work to retain a diverse business and legal affairs team. The team works hard every day to make SoundCloud great, and they do this because not only are they hard workers, but they are each represented, valued and – in turn – vested in our collective successes. That’s diversity in action.

SoundCloud is unique, as it sits across multiple industries. For example, the music industry overall still has work to do in advancing diversity and inclusion commitments that truly reflect the breadth of the music community. The tech industry, on the other hand, has a steeper climb because of the lack of representation across women, people of color and LGBTQ. I was on a panel several years ago with other openly gay black men in tech, and everything I heard there confirmed the need for the tech space to do better at all levels, from hiring and cultural processes, to supporting STEM diversity. The good news is that people, from the CEO down, see the problems, which is the first step in creating change. I’m proud to work at SoundCloud knowing almost half our board of directors, and three quarters of our lead board members are people of color. It’s important for me to continually work and build on this achievement, while leading by example.

When it comes to improving diversity, as a leader, you need to first and foremost focus on visibility, because optics are everything. I present at as many external events and panels as possible. I say yes to as many networking opportunities for students and young lawyers as I can accommodate. I’m always willing to share my story – the good, the bad and the ugly! I also actively look for ways to raise the visibility of my team at all levels of the organization and sing their praises. We succeed when everyone gets an opportunity to shine, and I want to celebrate the good things and spread the love.

Recruitment is clearly the critical place to drive diversity and inclusion, and I focus on this area in my efforts at SoundCloud. First, it’s important to go to where the talent is, and ensure job postings end up on sites that draw diverse audiences. I then alert and activate my personal network, which helps funnel young and diverse talent that would benefit my department and SoundCloud as a whole.

It’s also important to have patience in the recruiting process to ensure we identify and interview diverse candidates. SoundCloud uses interview panels, which include multiple stakeholders with different viewpoints to help candidates get a strong sense for individual departments, such as my business and legal affairs team, and SoundCloud as a company.

SoundCloud also offers diversity resource groups (DRGs), which help to recruit talent and forge connections while building community. I personally encourage participation in these groups, because it’s not just enough to bring someone in the door, you want them to stay and contribute. Part of being able to do so is feeling comfortable, and DRGs provide an opportunity for people to find that comfort level, make connections, and feel empowered to bring their whole selves to work. For those who are not DRG members, these groups can provide a platform and an opportunity to learn about the backgrounds, culture and experiences of people who are unlike themselves. If we’re going to talk about our product road map or what’s next in music, but have gaps in understanding between our organization and our creator community, then there is a disconnect and a missed business opportunity. DRGs provide a concrete structure for bringing insight and connectivity to SoundCloud.

I serve as the executive sponsor of one of our DRGs, Clouds of Color. This means I have to truly show up, be available to the employees, champion and advocate for them and their ideas, and represent their interests. It’s a role I take as seriously as being general counsel.

Diversity should also be a topic of discussion with external partners. I ask law firms that are pitching us their services how they approach diversity in their ranks and, specifically, whether diverse lawyers will be covering my matters. What connects law firms and in-house departments is the relationship and level of comfort you have. Fundamental to building this up is simply the ability to have a conversation about these issues. It’s important to constantly nurture that comfort level for the relationship to grow. It’s important to me, my team members who interact with outside counsel, and to our company, that the firms we work with reflect SoundCloud values, and it’s my hope that the firms we work with hold us to an equally high standard. The more that companies engage in dialogue with potential clients, the better for everyone, both for the industries being served by law firms and also for the legal industry.

Looking to the future, SoundCloud needs to continually seek out ways to diversify our ranks, promote more diverse employees into leadership positions and foster a culture of inclusiveness. Going above and beyond is what SoundCloud does really well for the 20 million plus creators on the platform and our listeners who come to SoundCloud to discover what’s new and next. I always want to bring that same energy and thinking to our diversity and inclusion strategy, and watch it thrive.