Appeal for Diversity

Workforce Management

To better serve their multicultural customer markets, corporations are putting pressure on the law firms they hire to diversify. But advocates say minorities have made only moderate gains in the legal profession.
By Mark Schoeff Jr.


Law firms that want to work for DuPont have to do more than show the breadth of their legal knowledge or trumpet the successes of their various practice groups. They must also put a priority on increasing the number of women, African-Americans, Asian-Amer­icans, Native Americans, Hispanics and openly gay lawyers in their ranks, and fill out a nine-page survey every year to report their progress.

"We not only encourage it, we require it," Andrew Schaeffer, DuPont’s managing counsel, operations and partnering, says of diversity.

Women and minorities are the primary contact with DuPont for 12 of the 40 firms that work for the chemical maker. That milestone has been reached on a road that started in 1992, when the company winnowed its network of hundreds of law firms to a few more than three dozen.

As companies like DuPont compete in domestic and global markets imbued with an array of cultures and colors of consumers, they want their suppliers—including those that provide legal advice—to be similarly diverse.

They also want the best value for the millions of dollars they spend on legal fees. Adding more races and ethnicities to the outside-counsel mix stimulates creative thinking and results in better case outcomes, according to company officials. Companies appear to embrace that approach as well. Observers say that internal corporate legal departments are way ahead of law firms when it comes to diversity.

But the business community isn’t applying enough pressure on the firms it hires to achieve substantial diversity gains, advocates say.

In 1999, Charles Morgan, then general counsel of BellSouth Corp., wrote "Diversity in the Workplace: A Statement of Principle," which was signed by nearly 500 corporations.

Disappointed with the outcome of that effort, Roderick Palmore, then executive vice president and general counsel of Sara Lee Corp., issued "A Call to Action: Diversity in the Legal Profession" in 2004.

That document, signed by 126 companies, states in part: "In an effort to realize a truly diverse profession and to promote diversity in law firms … we pledge that we will make decisions regarding which law firms represent our companies based in significant part on the diversity performance of the firms."

Four years later, Palmore, now executive vice president and general counsel at General Mills, is prodding companies to do more.

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