The CLOC DEIB Council is committed to achieve DEIB successes that will ensure a more inclusive and equitable legal operations community for the future. In doing so, we celebrate the leaders who have paved the way. In celebration of Black History Month, here are just a few of those leaders:

Willie Mae Mallory – Often left out of the historical narrative surrounding the Black Power Movement is Willie Mae Mallory, a member of the Harlem 9, who fought for the right to send her daughter to a desegregated school in the state of New York.

Sojourner Truth – Abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth is best known for her speech on racial inequalities, “Ain’t I a Woman?” delivered at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851.

Carl Stokes – Carl Stokes became the first African American mayor of a major U.S. city when he was elected mayor of Cleveland in November 1967. He later became a news anchorman, judge, and Ambassador to the United States.

Margaret Gardner – Many people are familiar with Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved, but there is much less recognition given to Margaret Gardner, the woman who inspired Morrison’s novel. To learn more about Margaret Gardner, check out this Northern Kentucky History hour video, where they explore the woman behind the novel.

Virgil Abloh – The first Black Artistic Director of Louis Vuitton, Virgil Abloh is known for bridging the gap between streetwear and high fashion.

Kimberly Crenshaw – Kimberlé Crenshaw is a well-known scholar whose career has spanned several decades focusing on civil rights, critical race theory, Black feminist legal theory, race, racism, and the law. In 1989, Crenshaw coined the term  “Intersectionality,” which she explains by saying, “Consider an analogy for traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.”In short, Crenshaw’s theory should challenge us to think critically about how discrimination is compounded by the layers of one’s identity.

Leymah Gbowe – 2011 Nobel Peace Laureate Leymah Gbowee is a Liberian peace activist, social worker and women’s rights advocate. She is Founder, and President of the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa, based in Monrovia.

Bayard Rustin – Civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, subject of the 2023 biopic Rustin, planned the 1963 March on Washington and was best known for his role as an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr.

Lorraine Hansberry– Playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry wrote ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ and was the first Black playwright and the youngest American to win a New York Critics’ Circle award.

Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler – Rebecca Lee Crumpler became the first Black woman in the United States to become a doctor of medicine. She was also one of the first Black authors of a medical publication; her book of medical advice for women and children released in 1883.

Grace Wisher  – Grace Wisher, a free-born Black girl from Baltimore, Maryland, helped stitch the Star-Spangled Banner during the six-year apprenticeship she began with white flag-maker Mary Pickersgill around 1810.

Sarah Boone – Biography, Inventor of the Modern-Day Ironing Board  – Sarah Boone was a 19th century African American dressmaker who was awarded a patent for her improved ironing board.

Garrett Morgan – Inventor of the Traffic Light & Gas Mask (biography.com)  – The Three-Light Traffic Signal, Invented by Garrett Morgan in 1923.

Frederick Jones – Biography, Inventor, Education & Death – Frederick Jones was an inventor best known for the development of refrigeration equipment used to transport food and blood during World War II.

James West – Inventor, Microphone & Facts (biography.com) – James West is a U.S. inventor and professor who, in 1962, developed the electret transducer technology later used in 90 percent of contemporary microphones.

Lewis Howard Latimer – Biography, Inventor, Draftsman – Lewis Howard Latimer was an inventor and draftsman best known for his contributions to the patenting of the light bulb and the telephone.

Mark Dean – Biography, Computer Scientist, Engineer – Computer scientist and engineer Mark Dean is credited with helping develop a number of landmark technologies, including the color PC monitor, the Industry Standard Architecture system bus and the first gigahertz chip.

James Van Der Zee – Photos, Quotes & Work (biography.com) – James Van Der Zee was a renowned, Harlem-based photographer known for his posed, storied pictures capturing African American citizenry and celebrity. James Van Der Zee – Photos, Quotes & Work (biography.com)

Jean-Michel Basquiat – Art, Death & Paintings (biography.com) – Jean-Michel Basquiat was a Neo-Expressionist painter in the 1980s. He is best known for his primitive style and his collaboration with pop artist Andy Warhol.

Gordon Parks – Photography, Movie & Quotes (biography.com) – Gordon Parks was a prolific, world-renowned photographer, writer, composer and filmmaker known for his work on projects like ‘Shaft’ and ‘The Learning Tree.’ Gordon Parks – Photography, Movie & Quotes

Edmonia Lewis – Sculptures, Quotes & Facts (biography.com) – The first professional African American and Native American sculptor, Edmonia Lewis earned critical praise for work that explored religious and classical themes.

Augusta Savage – Art, Harlem Renaissance & Facts (biography.com) – Sculptor Augusta Savage was one of the leading artists of the Harlem Renaissance as well as an influential activist and arts educator.

In 2020, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), updated its Core Competencies to reflect the increased scope and priorities for which today’s legal operations are responsible. CLOC also included language indicating that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) should be an essential element of the business processes and activities of legal operations professionals. 

By defining the functional areas that most legal teams oversee, CLOC CORE 12 provides vital guidelines on how a legal organization’s operations department can mature and grow across specific functional areas, depending on its priorities, objectives, opportunities, and resources. 

DEI plays an increasingly prominent role in each of the 12 CLOC Core Competencies. While corporate counsel have always had multiple expectations of their vendors, today we find DEI is being communicated and measured more frequently as a key part of vendor management programs. Furthermore, corporate legal departments are now far more likely to select firms that embrace DEI, push for more diverse staff to be assigned to their matters and have a formalized set of requirements for working with individuals and organizations that embrace DEI principles. 

This focus on DEI may seem like a recent trend, but, in fact, efforts to incorporate DEI have been ongoing across legal entities for many years.  For example, for more than a decade the enterprise legal management (ELM) software LexisNexis CounselLink® has included detailed demographics capabilities in their analytical tools to help firms and vendors measure their progress in meeting legal department DEI criteria.  

Nevertheless, the legal industry overall has been slower to adopt DEI practices and tracking than other industries. There are many reasons for this lag, ranging from professional culture and societal issues to technology aversion. The good news is that today DEI is increasingly more likely to be a central element of a legal department’s overall strategy.  

Beyond societal benefits, there are distinct business advantages to improving the diversity of a legal organization. According to research by Deloitte, highly inclusive teams outperform their peers by as much as 80%. Inclusive companies generate higher cash flow per employee, are more change-ready and innovative, and are more likely to be able to coach employees for improved performance and build leaders. McKinsey research shows that gender-diverse companies are 15% more likely to outperform their peers and ethnically diverse companies are 35% more likely to do the same. 

Nevertheless, for those organizations in the early stages of creating a DEI program, the task can seem daunting. The challenge is to determine where among the CLOC CORE 12 functions the change should begin. 

Rather than address all 12 areas at once, start with strategic planning to define concepts and goals and lock down executive support. Without executive attention and planning, DEI initiatives are unlikely to succeed. 

Start by identifying the department’s objectives for launching a DEI program, which will serve as a reference point to help keep the program launch on track and can be used to set initial benchmarks and measurable goals. Initial action items might include brainstorming to define the most relevant aspects of DEI to the department, hiring more diverse talent, and choosing to work with outside counsel who employ a minimum percentage of minority partners and meet other specified diversity standards. Ask stakeholders for their input on the benefits DEI might deliver, how DEI practices might impact legal operations, and the desired end result. 

After reviewing objectives to ensure that they align with departmental DEI priorities, the next step is to make a plan. To effectively track, manage, capture, store, and report on DEI data to evaluate the progress of your program, it will be necessary to leverage an enterprise legal management (ELM) solution with built-in DEI tools. Such software provides valuable measurement capabilities and features, including vendor profiles, vendor score cards, and diversity surveys that provide a holistic view of vendors and how they perform against the department’s DEI standards. These tools can also be used to measure the internal legal department’s progress. 

Business intelligence, one of the CLOC core competences, is another essential element of the DEI toolkit. The appropriate software will provide management dashboards that clearly convey comparisons and trends in vendor diversity. During a recent Buying Legal® webinar on DEI benchmarks for buyers of corporate legal services, speakers underscored the importance of producing data to support the organization’s DEI posture, noting that corporate law departments now regularly request diversity demographic information from their law firms, including information on gender, race, LGBTQ+, veteran status, and disability.  

Many corporate clients now set minimum standards for the in-house legal team to promote working in a diverse environment. They typically request granular detail, including metrics like the number of outside counsel hours worked by diverse timekeepers. They also monitor diversity trends of their law firms and require diverse timekeepers to be assigned mission-critical legal tasks and, if necessary, be given opportunities to develop necessary skills. Some clients offer bonuses to firms that increase diversity, while others have started to withhold a portion of their invoices if the firms do not meet their diversity requirements. 

A recent ABA article highlighted the fact that, while corporate clients now increasingly include DEI metrics during the RFP process, law firms have not yet lost significant existing business due to weak DEI results. However, at CounselLink we have witnessed a continuous movement toward DEI metrics as a deciding factor for new legal work when all other factors, such as skill sets, results, and expertise, are equal. 

In other words, diversity benchmarks will become increasingly important to legal departments’ success – and this is why a commitment to DEI must be woven throughout each of the 12 CLOC Core Competencies.