Posted by on Friday, April 25, 2014
Welcome to this week’s Diversity Dish and Happy Friday! This week we are sharing two pieces of news. First, most of you have probably heard that Microsoft has just made a $250,000 contribution to LCLD. Next, we are sharing the results of a recent Nextions study on unconscious bias. Don’t forget to register for the NALP / ALFDP Diversity and Inclusion Summit in Chicago on June 6, if you haven’t already! Enjoy this week’s Diversity Dish, Happy Friday and if you aren’t already, follow us on Twitter @CourtneyDredden.
4.18.14 Microsoft has made a $250,000 contribution to the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity. “LCLD, composed of the Managing Partners of the nation’s leading law firms and the General Counsel of Fortune 500 corporations, has taken on a multi-year “Talent to Leadership” commitment. Its programs reach diverse law students through mentoring and first-year (1L) initiatives and also provide career development and networking opportunities for attorneys who have been identified by their firms or corporate legal departments as rising leaders.” Brad Smith of Microsoft notes that it is critical to recognize and support strong diverse lawyers and to help create opportunities for them. This contribution will help LCLD do just that. You can read more information on this great contribution here.
4.22.14 Kaitlin Edleman reports on Vault Blogs on a study that seems to confirm racial bias from law firm partners. Edleman states that a new Nextions study (which can be found here) found that law firm partners demonstrated an unconscious or implicit bias when evaluating the writing of a male African American associate. The study gave a hypothetical memo from a third year litigation associate to 60 partners from 22 law firms -- the partners had agreed to participate in a writing analysis exercise. The memo was riddled with 22 purposeful errors that the Nextions team had added. About half of the partners were told the memo was written by an African American associate and the other half were told it was written by a white associate. The results were startling, but perhaps not surprising: the partners who were evaluating the brief by the African American associate gave it lower scores and an overall lower ranking. Interestingly, “no significant correlation was found between a partner’s race/ethnicity or gender and the patterns of errors found between the two memos, although female partners generally found more errors and provided longer comments than male partners.” This study really hits home the fact that law firms need to be recognizing and combating unconscious bias.