Category: Interviews

We provide web-enabled transportation services. One example is that we match shippers like Unilever and Anheuser-Busch to high-quality truck carriers in our network. We have an app, like many apps you find on your phone, that connects shippers and carriers. Of course, if you or I just drive a truck off the street, Anheuser-Busch is not going to let us ship their beer all over the country. Shippers want to be connected to a trusted network of carriers. At Convoy, we connect a broad range of high-quality small, medium, and large carriers to some of the best shippers in the industry. These carriers leverage our technology through the Convoy app to unlock more choices. With the Convoy app, they have the freedom to determine where they want to go and when they want to return – while still delivering freight for shippers on time and at a competitive rate.

We can also support the backhaul. When the truck has dropped off goods and is on its way back home with an empty trailer, the driver most likely isn’t getting paid for that, this pollutes the earth, it costs money for fuel, and they’re away from their families with essentially no reward. Our technology helps eliminate waste, because carriers get to choose only the loads that they want to take, and they can work more efficiently. Through our app, drivers can control their own schedules and decide, ‘I’m not going to take that load today because I want to see my kid’s first t-ball game, but I’ll take this one tomorrow.’ They’re going to see loads and be able to select loads that make sense for them. Drivers can feel like they’re actually running their own business.

In terms of diversity and inclusion, our industries – technology and trucking – have historically lagged behind. But, you’d be hard-pressed to find two industries that have more D&I opportunities. At Convoy – and, in fairness, given the status quo in these spaces we might be ahead of the curve – we’re still committed to doing more. The reality is that although we are diverse compared to other trucking and technology companies, there is a ton of work to do. Gender and racial diversity are obviously big opportunity areas in trucking and technology industries. It can be challenging for women and people of color to break into these industries – and even harder for them to thrive. The reasons for this vary all the way from being required to complete a road training with a strange guy who tells you he doesn’t understand why a woman would want to drive a truck, to being excluded and isolated as someone who doesn’t ‘look’ like they belong in the industry.

At Convoy, we established ‘Women @ Convoy’, which is a group founded by women here. We want to be frontrunners in terms of increasing the number of women in trucking. Our app just might be the solution for women who need the flexibility of being able to choose which loads they take. This is an $800bn industry, so there has to be a way for women to tap into those dollars. Ultimately, as autonomous trucking evolves, we might even see the trucking industry further evolve and create job opportunities that are even more attractive to women and people of color.

At Convoy, we want to stay intentional about our commitment to people. By doing so, I think that Convoy will up-level the role and image of being a trucker. With our platform, people will have a choice in terms of what hours they want to work, how they want to structure their careers, and maybe even hold multiple jobs, such as a teacher who is a Convoy carrier during the summers. I also generally think that the Convoy app itself will make it easier for those who have historically been excluded from the trucking industry. This is because when you think about it, how do most people find a great job? It’s through a friend, or through someone else who they know well. Convoy’s app is like that friend who introduces you to and gives you access to the best jobs. That’s how I hope carriers will think of us.

We are also building diverse teams within Convoy. I’m incredibly proud of my legal team at Convoy. I was the first lawyer here in 2017, and now we have six members of the legal team and growing. A majority of the team consists of women and lawyers of color. Everyone is committed to D&I and actively involved in activities that support these efforts in our community. The way I think about leadership, including with respect to D&I, is that I didn’t come to Convoy to be a lawyer, I came to be a leader. We’re building something. I am at Convoy in part because I wanted the opportunity to influence the culture and, at Convoy, my voice shows up. I’m heard.

I personally don’t believe anything significant and lasting happens in the D&I space unless companies have diverse leadership teams. You can try to do a bottom-up diversification effort, but I’m not convinced that companies can effectively build a sustainable pipeline of gender and racial diversity unless people see leaders at their company who are representative of the diversity that they want to attract. It is very hard to get software engineers who are women and people of color – and when I say it’s hard, that doesn’t mean I think that gives companies an excuse not to do it, I mean it’s challenging and hasn’t been done very well by anyone so far – but it is doable. My position is that tech companies solve really challenging problems all the time, and D&I shouldn’t be an exception.

In my view, a core responsibility of a leadership team is to both ensure that the D&I pipeline is being fed and, importantly, advocate for existing D&I leaders, including up-and-coming senior leaders of that company. I have helped to drive a number of successful D&I initiatives over the years, including as president of the African American Bar Association (Loren Miller Bar Association) here in Washington state, as a member of the Rainier Scholars’ board of trustees, and as a former board chairwoman for Habitat for Humanity Seattle-South King County, and I have come to realize that if the leadership team isn’t on board – if the leadership doesn’t prioritize D&I – it’s simply not going to happen for any sustainable period of time.

I’m really proud of Convoy for our commitment to D&I, including through the efforts of our Women @ Convoy employee resource group. The reality is that we all could be doing better, but I’m really proud that the team is committed to demonstrating D&I leadership.

Before I became dean, I did research on the behavior of judges. We studied panels of three judges considering voting rights cases, most of which involved racial claims. Even after controlling for a variety of other background factors, we found that the presence of an African American judge affected how the white judges voted, when we compared how the white judges had voted in previous voting rights cases. We found that when there was an African American judge on the panel, the other judges were more likely to find that there was a violation of voting rights. Our conclusion was that the presence of an African American judge affected how the other two judges thought about the case – that an African American judge brought a different perspective.

Appellate judges sitting on these cases are really at the pinnacle of the legal profession and, for us, it highlighted the importance of diversity within the profession. If we don’t achieve sufficient diversity of perspectives, of thought, and of background within the legal profession, the profession as a whole will be lesser for it.

I think one of the challenges for diverse students on their pathway to law is having sufficient role models – to see that there are other individuals that have a similar background and life experiences, and can triumph along that path. That’s something that I hear very much from applicants: they wonder whether they are blazing a path that’s new or whether there are leaders who are good role models for them – and even, potentially, direct mentors.

Another challenge is the cost of higher education, particularly for professional schools. A concern that we hear from applicants is whether the cost of higher education and the loans that students sometimes take out to pay for their education constrain their career choices later on. We’ve taken a number of steps to try to alleviate that, but I do think it is a particular challenge, especially for students from traditionally disadvantaged backgrounds or first-generation professional students.

We are a relatively small law school in terms of student enrolment and we have a very tightknit community. Among law schools, we’re known for our academic approach to law, so we have an environment where the students are very much engaged on issues of law, policy and politics. They are here because they want to study the most challenging issues of our time that law has a role in resolving, and we’re committed to serious dialogue on a series of controversial and important topics.

We’ve always been a school that has cast a very wide net in our recruitment efforts. We go far and wide to find the very best students that we can – we don’t just rely on a few big-name schools, we do outreach to some lesser-known schools, because we know that there’s terrific student talent there. We’ve partnered with CLEO (Council on Legal Education Opportunity), a standalone entity that works nationwide to expand opportunities and encourage students while they’re still in high school and college to think about law school. We’ve hosted summer workshops with them for many years and we think it’s really an important endeavour.

We’ve also tried to encourage students to come to law school through expanding our scholarship programs. A graduate gave us a generous scholarship gift that is specifically targeted at students who have financial need and who are academically excellent. We have also had a series of scholarship gifts from another graduate to encourage us to find the most talented students that we can find. Both of these programs have brought a terrific and diverse set of students, in addition to our existing body of financial aid.

Once the students are here, we do a number of things to engage and prepare them for a career in which they are going to be challenged with a diverse set of clients and a variety of difficult and knotty legal challenges. We’ve instituted a number of new initiatives to encourage more dialogue among students around some of these difficult topics. For example, last year we instituted student roundtables, where two faculty members get together with a small group of students. They choose a topic of contemporary legal controversy and the two faculty members agree in advance to take opposite positions, debating in the presence of these students, and then drawing the students into the conversation. It’s a way to model and encourage serious discourse from a diverse set of views and backgrounds on really challenging issues of our time. Our students have signed up to them in record numbers – there is almost always a waiting list for one of these.

We encourage students to participate in a variety of important legal professional development opportunities. For example, one of the hallmarks of academic excellence in American legal education is participation in our Law Reviews – I always want every student to try to work on Law Review. There’s a selection process, and we have made efforts to engage in outreach to our student groups, such as our Black Law Student Association and our LatinX Law Student Association, to encourage their members to apply.

Similarly, one of the hallmarks of accomplishment for a law student is to obtain a clerkship with a judge. This is a one-year job in which a student works with a judge to help them write their opinions and execute their decisions, and it’s a really great privilege – it’s a wonderful mentorship opportunity and a real, true apprenticeship. These are very competitive jobs, they are very prestigious to get, and we have, in recent years, made a greater effort to encourage our students to seek and obtain these clerkships. We’ve made a particular effort to encourage our students from traditionally underrepresented groups to apply, and I’m very glad that, overall, our student body is obtaining them at record numbers.

Three years ago, I created a diversity committee within the law school, which consists of administrators and several faculty members – so we have a vehicle for thinking continuously about these issues, getting real-time feedback about what is helpful and what is less helpful, and generating new ideas. The committee works with the student liaison committee to have continuous contact with students and to get feedback from them about whether our initiatives and programing are successful.

The university has an office of diversity and inclusion with a set of programs, which we partner on. I think the university recognizes that whether it’s the department of history, or the law school, or the business school, each one is different – their curricular programs are different, their faculty and students are different – and they provide a helpful level of assistance to tailor the programming and the initiatives to what is right for their particular student body.

The law school recently hired a director of diversity and inclusion to work with our students. We know that students from traditionally underrepresented groups face particular challenges, and having a director to work with them within the dean of students’ office is an additional support that we provide. We’ve just filled the position, so practices are just being established, but he will be a resource for the students.

I think all law schools are attentive to these issues now. Historically, it was not the case that there was always an emphasis on this. Our university, unlike other universities, never engaged in forms of discrimination in its admissions – from the very beginning our admissions were open to women and to people of all racial and religious backgrounds. I think other universities had explicit policies of exclusion at various points in time. But I think all law schools now are attentive to diversity and inclusion, and they do it in different ways.

Our law school is very much committed to a legal education that’s intellectual and interdisciplinary, and so when we emphasize diversity, it can take two elements. One is a diverse range of experience and views, because that greater range of experiences and views and perspectives enriches the intellectual conversation about challenging legal issues. Then, when we think about inclusion, we’re seeking for students here to feel supported so that they can fully take advantage of the education we provide.

Lawyers are going to go out into the world and be the representatives, often, of the most vulnerable, or they will be representing clients in very high stakes matters and they will have to be able to operate in a challenging, effective and successful way. That’s a tall order, and so we emphasize an education that exposes them to a wide range of views and perspectives. And we provide, we hope, the support that allows them to become that professional who can handle the most challenging cases and the knottiest legal problems.

A year ago, I was invited to speak at a law school event in Miami. While there, I was introduced to the chancellor of Southern University Law Center, John Pierre, and he said: ‘We’re doing things differently here’. It sounded intriguing, so a colleague and I from NetApp went to visit, with the goal of meeting some of Southern’s students and potentially hiring an intern. It was a life-changing event. When we got there, we discovered that the students were recruited for ‘grit and gratitude’, and they were amazing – one after another, after another.

Their life experiences were different compared to what I typically see for a student attending one of the Bay Area law schools. They’re not generally going into big law – that’s one of the areas to which they don’t have access. Many of them have had jobs for a long period of time, so they have a sense of what it is to work, alongside a passion for what they are studying and why they are studying. There’s a true desire to make a real difference in their communities. There’s an aspiration to learn and be exposed to a multitude of experiences so that they can bring that back and uplift their communities. The school itself is in Baton Rouge, one of the poorest cities in the US, and the students simply have a different cultural background, work background, attitude, and a real sense of grit.

The chancellor didn’t just know everybody’s name. He knew every student’s background and the struggles that it took everyone to even get to law school. Many of them are first-generation college students, let alone law school students. He personally knows them; he personally called and recruited them. It’s a very difficult selection process and that’s how he ends up with students who possess such grit.

After discussing my experience at Southern with Matt Fawcett, NetApp’s general counsel, we decided we would definitely hire an intern from Southern and that we would invite some of our friends to hire interns from there as well. We contacted Walmart, Liberty Mutual, Juniper, Chronicle, Keesal Young & Logan and LexCheck, and those are now on the initial advisory board of CLI.

At the same time, I started talking with Southern and Chancellor John Pierre about offering a combined training program. I have a wide network, in part because of my time with and founding CLOC, so I started to make some phone calls to experts in the industry, and everybody was anxious to raise their hand and volunteer. So, we have designed a program for the summer of 2019. It consists of one-hour sessions every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday during June and July, and if you attend 80% of the 24 sessions, you will receive a certification in personal development from CLI and Southern University.

Then I thought, well heck, if we’re going to create a training program for 50, we may as well create it for 5,000. The speakers are so extraordinary that we thought we should open it up to our legal department and across the business. We have six legal interns, but NetApp itself has 140 interns, so we opened it up to all of them – whether they be in marketing, sales or engineering – because what the speakers are covering crosses the boundary of legal and dives into business and general career-based topics. We also opened it up to law firms.

Happily, CLI has expanded my existing network. John Pierre has a broad network of law schools himself, so I have been introduced to other deans of universities. One of them had a group of 60 law schools, primarily from the South, that had been meeting regularly. These schools often don’t have access for their students in regions that are outside of the community they are traditionally working in and with. As a result, we’ve been exposed to predominantly African-American communities, and to a well-organized group of students that have not had much access to Fortune 500 companies, and these companies have not had access to this group of students.

At the moment, we have about 1,000 attendees signed up for CLI, and the goal is 5,000 before the end of summer – so we want to get the word out. We are recording sessions and, for regions like Australia where the sessions take place in the middle of the night, you can download the recordings and play them at your leisure.

As we get the word out about CLI, the community is really starting to grow. Those on the board are keeping in touch with one another, working on joint projects and working together to build the CLI community. And the students are becoming connected to one another. If you’re on during the sessions, you can see them chatting – they are very engaged, passionate and enthusiastic about becoming connected with one another, and they’re literally all over the globe. During the school year, we may see it taken to the next level, when some of the students are together in person and they have had a common experience of interning and of participating in the CLI and receiving the certification.

At NetApp, the interns meet in a conference room together during each session, so there’s 30 at this location who convene in person for each one of the presentations. They’re completely building their own network and creating connections outside of their own speciality areas, which gives them a broad view of how an enterprise works. In the practice of law, this is very important, because those are our internal business clients, and any time when we get closer to them – whether it be through our interns or through our technology – we are able to provide better legal services.

One of the most important goals of CLI has been achieving a focus on diversity and inclusion. This has come directly from the interests, passion and commitment of the general counsel, and then, of course, across the department. In the case of this project specifically, the NetApp general counsel has endorsed this relationship from the start – he is an extraordinary leader and can identify when there’s an opportunity. He then empowers me and others to go out and explore.

But D&I is also a natural fit for legal operations. This community is well connected to one another and we are able to collaborate when we see good programming and good opportunity. In this case, there’s opportunity in terms of creating the next generation of attorneys who have a fundamental connection with one another and a focus on diversity and inclusion from before they graduate. It becomes part of their DNA prior to even completing their legal training – so who knows what that will look like in another ten years? Some of the impact is short term and some of the impact is much longer term. As these relationships develop and strengthen through the years, they will change, morph and evolve as these students find jobs and remain connected. As a result, we will have this thread of diversity and inclusion running through multiple different job experiences, geographies, law schools and employers.

But I think this is a topic that extends beyond legal. Inside NetApp, we have partnered with both our diversity, inclusion and belonging group, and also our university and recruiting group. So, connections have been established – not only across the industry and then the globe, but across NetApp.

It has been a bit of a surprise to me to discover there is already a diverse community existing that I didn’t know about. We’re not having to start from scratch in terms of creating a diverse and passionate community – we just have to be plugged into one another. NetApp is located in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the South Bay; there’s an infrastructure here, there’s an infrastructure there, and we just didn’t know about each other. So now, being able to take advantage of years of connecting in our own silos, we can expand two or three or four mature communities into one unified body, all at different ages and stages of our careers.

By putting together CLI, it’s been fantastic to find we have incredible people standing in line and raising their hands to volunteer their time, talent and commitment to help all these interns get started in their careers. Everybody has been enthusiastic when they have been approached to speak, and not only have they been donating their time, but also resources. For example, one speaker is offering online training at a discount for the students, taking away an economic barrier and therefore allowing students to more easily share in her gift and talent.

We’re making a difference in the lives of these students. It is so impacting.

There continues to be a heated battle for talent. The battle has been happening for a while, but I think it just continues to intensify as more and more leaders try to figure out what environment they can create, and what culture they can promote, that will attract the very best talent and allow it to thrive. Every law student and every early career person you talk to wants the opportunity to become the very best at what they can do – and that is the responsibility we have.

We’ve had a longstanding relationship with Street Law (which educates about law and government in schools and communities), because we recognize there is not enough diverse talent coming into the legal profession, and this allows us to reach students early and help them navigate through the legal path. We love the fact that Street Law is allowing us to connect with high school students that are interested in the legal profession. The Silicon Valley Urban Debate League has a similar program that is intended to get high school students interested in the law through a debate-like forum, and we continue to be active there, too.

We’ve gone so far as to hire directly on campus; we’re one of the few companies that do that and and have done so for almost ten years. This allows us to engage with a set of talent that, candidly, most corporate legal departments just aren’t seeing.

Diversity and inclusion is no longer a talking point or a buzz-phrase – you need to live it every day. If your work environment and your culture don’t continue to enforce that, you won’t attract diverse people, those you do attract you won’t retain and, ultimately, you will be playing with the second or third-best talent. That’s just not a recipe for success.

We have a strong belief that if you don’t have the right basic culture, no specific program is going to move the needle, so there is a lot of focus in the legal team on creating an overall culture – whether it’s around work-life balance, the amenities in the workplace, parental leave and the like – that we think is consistent with having a diverse and inclusive workforce.

The office of legal and administrative affairs has a very robust talent program that we call the ‘talent factory’, which is intended to bring talent in at the very early levels of the organization and promote them through thereafter. What that means is every manager understanding specifically where their employee stands, where they need to go next, and how they’re going to get there. It’s very personalized and it allows us to focus very much on diversity and inclusion.

It’s one thing to look at numbers and statistics, and they are important, but at the same time you really need to look at each individual, the role that they’re in, and their career path. I’m proud to say that seven of my 12 direct reports would be considered diverse by US standards. If you look throughout the organization, you see individuals who have come in at entry level and have been promoted through to more and more impactful positions. To me, that’s the key aspect of any D&I program – it’s those individual stories and that career progression.

We are in the midst of a rollout of our next inclusion program iteration across my team, using an outside vendor who brings an intellectually rigorous approach to inclusion, including talking about how the brain works. We all recognize that diverse and inclusive teams are more innovative and they’re more successful. Therefore, acknowledging our own built-in biases – which everyone has – and then understanding how to deal with them in a team environment is incredibly important.

Brian Tippens, our chief diversity and inclusion officer, is a lawyer by background and I convinced him to rotate into my organization and run what I call the ‘OLAA (office of legal and administrative affairs) employee experience’, focused on culture, inclusion and diversity. His task is to look at the experience of our employees end-to-end – to take a fresh look at what it means to be a member of our team and what kind of experience they are getting, and then design initiatives to continue pushing that experience forward. I’m excited to see Brian actually in the process of looking around and coming up with ideas and initiatives. It’s early days, and he is currently formulating his plan. I can’t wait to see what it is and start working for this next chapter of success.

You never stop learning about yourself, you never stop learning about your team, and culture is always changing in some form or fashion, even though the core principles may stay the same. In the last couple of years, I do think we’ve seen a shift in balance between inclusion and diversity, versus just talking about diversity, and we have seen the conversation move to one where many of the inclusion presentations I now see talk much more about how we work as humans, how our brains function – so that we can actually work on strategies to be more inclusive.

We are all continuing on this journey, and I think that’s actually what makes this such a super interesting and exciting issue. In some regards, the way it’s sometimes been talked about in the past was as if we were trying to solve a problem. I don’t think this is solving a problem; I think this is inspiring your talent and building teams that are going to continue to be high-performing. That’s a never-ending opportunity – and what makes these jobs fun, especially when you see some successes, is knowing that you’ve got to continue to progress if you’re going to continue being successful.

We’re also always looking to make an impact in the marketplace with the organizations that we support, and we are very active with my own team in legal pro bono and community service, participating in the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity, the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, and organizations like the National Center for Women and Information Technology and National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering. We’re constantly looking for that external feedback to make sure that what we’re doing falls into the category of best practice.

One of my personal favorites recently is the fact that we’ve worked with the Girl Scouts of the USA to create a cybersecurity badge, for young girls to get an interest at that early stage in a cybersecurity career. It’s based on a videogame, and other organizations are currently looking at how to try to leverage it for other types of things.

That community piece is also an inspiration inside the company for folks, whether they are in legal or not. We are always looking to make sure that our brand is associated with the inclusion and diversity work that we’re doing, whether it’s joining amicus briefs or signing on to certain compacts around diversity and inclusion. I’m super proud to be at a company that has really been at the forefront of these things since its founding. You don’t feel like you’re trying to push a rock uphill. More often than not, it feels like you’re on the downhill side and just trying to pedal fast enough to keep up with the momentum.

Diversity and inclusion has been a part of our RFP process going back to before I took over running the legal organization. Again, you’re looking for that team dynamic. I think the days of hiring law firms is long past; certainly it is for us. What’s happened is that you’re not even just hiring a lawyer at this point, you’re hiring a team. And if that team isn’t diverse and inclusive, you’re not going to end up with the outcomes you want, so just from a practical and pragmatic perspective, that’s important. It’s been an initiative across numerous companies to continue fostering the growth of diverse talent inside the law firms, and the power of the purse is important in that regard – we are certainly supportive in that way.

The legal department serves the business and other functions, so it’s a great opportunity to put diversity in front of them. Our clients may get very comfortable with one lawyer, or one type of lawyer, but we are really pushing – for example, ‘This person is the expert on this topic’, or ‘This is someone that we’d like you to work with’ – and making sure that we are providing our lawyers with good exposure.

At the end of the day, decisions are not only made by me – I don’t get to pick the next GC on my way out; it’s a decision the CEO is going to make, so they will need adequate exposure to a number of people. It will be a decision the rest of the executive team and board is going to weigh in on – so how am I ensuring that folks I think could be candidates, no matter what their developmental path, are getting the attention that they need?

We didn’t have much of a pipeline when I joined Peabody in 2015, so I began to work with recruiting firms that I know focus on diversity. I’ve always made sure I’m given a diverse and representative set of attorneys for an open position – women, men, diversity from an ethnic standpoint, international, LBGTQ, war veterans. I then make sure that whoever is interviewing candidates understands this is an important element of our recruiting.

We’ve got a good mentoring program that we’re building through our HR department, and I’ve made sure that several individuals on my team – both men and women, but with a focus on women – have been part of that, so they are developing the right skills for the next level. Sometimes they’re not even thinking about moving up, so it’s really getting them to think about and own their careers, and nurture them, alongside me.

Some level of sponsorship is important. There are unconscious biases that can come into play, like the halo effect – someone looks like you, so you may be more willing to sponsor them or almost overlook deficiencies. It’s important to me that everybody is given that level of sponsorship and I’m there advocating for people who others may not be advocating for. I want to make sure people are giving folks that may not fit their definition of someone that should be developed that opportunity too. It really is, I think, taking that broader chance on people, including those who may look and think different from you, but do deserve a seat at the table.

If you don’t measure something, how do you know it’s actually happening? We create data and measure it with our in-house lawyers and external law firms in terms of who they are putting up front for us to work with. We don’t yet tie metrics to people’s goals, and that is where I think it would be most effective. The companies where I’ve seen it take hold are the ones that start to tie it to individual goals and commitments, which then moves the company’s commitment. I also think it’s important that not only the management team hold each other accountable; it’s about holding peers and direct reports accountable too. ‘I see what you’re doing for person X, what about person Y?’ And if they don’t have a particular skill, ‘What are you doing to help them develop it?’

Furthermore, there have to be clear-cut development plans in writing that you can hold people accountable to. I’ve seen too many people recall discussions they’ve had regarding development, and three or four years later nothing has happened because no plan was put together. I have strongly pushed to get plans in writing, work with HR, and then have quarterly check-ins to make sure movement is happening. I think it’s like anything else in developing a business – it has to be a process where people are held accountable, all the way up to the CEO.

There are a lot of people coming at diversity with the best of intentions – including me – and I think that we’re now stepping back and focusing more on data, and looking at what works for other companies and other industries. There’s a lot more partnering going on to make sure that we’re sharing strategies and efforts that work – and maybe discarding, a little faster, things that really aren’t moving the needle. For a long time, there was a lot of talk about mentoring and now we’re realizing it’s really about sponsorship.

You can’t do things the same way as in the past. For example, when trying to get women on the board, you can’t insist that people have a CEO background, because you’re going to find maybe five women who fit that. You have to be willingly flexible on requirements. And then you need to have the answers to individuals who say, ‘You’re just setting quotas and lowering standards.’ You’ve got to be able to play back to the data that shows it works. Sometimes we do have to take a chance if we think people have got the innate skills and there are maybe just some other things we need to work through to build that.

When we put out the RFPs for our convergence panel, to get our 100+ firms down to 13, diversity was very much one of the criteria we used to measure the firms. And it wasn’t just a soft criteria, we made it clear that we were going to reach out every month and ask for data, and have a monthly call with the relationship partner to talk through what’s working and what isn’t working – including diversity and inclusion.

We’re also going out to firms individually to talk about the relationship, meet with their affinity groups and associates, and ask ‘What can my team do differently?’ What we’ve heard is: ‘We need work on the biggest matters, but we also want mentoring and the sponsorship.’ One of the things we heard from those associates was that they need us to send the message back to the firm, so the firm is hearing about their work.

As a result, we’ve stepped back and really thought through what can be done differently so people can get noticed at their firm. We do surveys and rate associates we have worked with on a one-to-five scale. If they get a five, we send a letter back to the committees that are making decisions about who gets promoted to partner. That direct, one-to-one dialogue with the very individuals we’re trying hard to impact is very important.

The vast majority of firms on our convergence panel have been supportive and understood what we’re trying to achieve. There have been one or two who have said, ‘Well, we’re in a location where it’s very hard to hire diversely’, and I’ve challenged them: ‘Is it really? You may need to change your outreach or approach, there are likely ways to attract people and reach in earlier, through colleges or otherwise, in order to identify those students.’

We’re not kicking people out of our convergence, we are working with them to challenge such approaches. We’re also recognizing it will take more time with some firms depending on location or sophistication and their journey on this diversity pathway. We’re here to influence, not criticize.

To me, the next success is getting this built into goals: setting clear metrics and pathways over multiple years. I think people are already seeing the business benefit, but there are ways for them to see even more clearly. I’m not going to feel successful until folks are truly on board in a way that we can measure and demonstrate change.

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.