Alexis Robertson is the Director of Diversity & Inclusion at Foley & Lardner LLP where she provides firm-wide strategic direction and oversight on all diversity and inclusion related matters. Alexis talks to us about her journey out of litigation to recruiting, and ultimately to diversity and inclusion work. We speak about the structural racism within our industry and the challenges law firms face in making meaningful progress on diversity and inclusion with respect not only to recruiting, but work allocation, mentorship, and professional development. Ultimately, Alexis tells us that the work begins at the individual level and challenges us to all do the hard, introspective work of examining our roles in perpetuating discrimination. Only then can we really effect the widespread changes needed in our firms, industry, and communities.
We discuss:
- Try to identify your “through-line”, the thing that seems to pull you to your next step
- If you make a step, and realize it’s still not a fit, just keep moving; it’s not a sign of failure
- The pillars of diversity and inclusion (D&I) are recruiting, retention, and promotion
- “Best practices” is a tricky term because is can sometimes just mean “minimum baseline requirement”
- D&I can’t be treated as a separate office; to be effective, its principles have to be at the core of every decision made
- This moment in history could be an opportunity to push firms to incorporate these policies/practices more pervasively
- Law firms fall on a spectrum of how deep this work goes; how committed they are to changing not only statistics, but their internal culture
- The practice of only hiring from the top law schools has the effect of eliminating a pipeline of strong candidates (many of whom are minorities) who have selected other law schools for financial, family, or other reasons
- Firms are risk averse and not inclined towards early adoption; but someone has to start changing this limited hiring system
- Addressing affinity bias in work allocation, promotion, mentoring is key
- We each have to do real self reflection on our own implicit bias: who we interact with, what our hard-wired reactions are to people, etc.
- Get uncomfortable
- The challenge is to keep engaged with this work even though we don’t “have to”
- We, as lawyers, need to put our money where I mouth is with our commitment to justice
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