Business wins when we welcome and embrace diverse backgrounds and perspectives.
Karen Roberts, general counsel, Walmart
Louise Pentland, chief legal officer, PayPal
Strategy
For PayPal as a company, one of our core values is diversity and inclusion – it is not just a poster on the wall. It is fundamental to how we build our products. Fintech at PayPal is about democratizing money and allowing access to financial services to everyone.
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Joel Stern, CEO, NAMWOLF
When I was at Accenture, I managed all of our global outside counsel spend as well as our diversity and inclusion legal program. I love big law and NAMWOLF is not a play against big law.
Eric Grossman, chief legal officer, Morgan Stanley
At Morgan Stanley, we are in the service profession – we don’t make anything. Rather, we serve the communities we operate in. But we don’t always reflect those communities in the ways we would like. Putting aside the moral and ethical issues, we just think this is bad business, and as a goal, we want to better reflect the communities we serve.
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Caroline Tsai, deputy general counsel, BMO
BMO has a long history as a champion of diversity and inclusion – it’s a core value and a key priority for us. This includes diversity of perspectives, experiences, abilities, cultures and gender.
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Dana Rao, vice president of intellectual property and litigation, Adobe
I’m an electrical engineer by training and then became a patent lawyer. In patent law you need to have a technical degree before obtaining your law degree, and so, even though I’m in the legal field, I see first-hand the diversity issues that tech companies are facing. The pool of diverse candidates in the engineering space is smaller than it should be, and so the pool in patent law is even smaller.
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Amy Weaver, general counsel, Salesforce
I think it’s absolutely critical for a company to embrace diversity and inclusion. At Salesforce, we operate in a very competitive industry – one that is evolving every day and where innovation isn’t a ‘nice-to-have’, but a business imperative.
Mark Roellig, general counsel, MassMutual
Diversity for me has been an issue I’ve been passionate about throughout my career. It’s certainly something which has evolved over time, but it’s rooted in my upbringing. My parents were very involved in the Civil Rights Movement back in the 1960s, so from an early age it has been ingrained in us as children that concepts like civil rights, diversity and valuing differences were the right thing to do.
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Nell O’Donnell, general counsel, Brocade
A diverse workforce means you have a diversity of experience and a diversity of opinion, which translates into better products and better services. We service customers worldwide and our team has to reflect that in order for us to remain competitive.
Mike Cammarota, senior director of legal services, Accenture
A number of years ago, while interviewing an individual for an open position on my team, he shared a very personal concern with me. He told me that he was gay and that was causing him concern about how he would be perceived, should he be out in the workplace with his colleagues. He also worried that he may be treated differently because of his sexuality.
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