Diversity Is Everyone’s Issue (Perspective)

Editor’s Note: The author of this post is a lawyer at a large law firm.

So let’s address the elephant in the room. Yes, I am a white senior partner talking about diversity. Why? Because increasing diversity in the legal profession can’t be just a minority or women’s issue. It must be everyone’s issue.

That’s why O’Melveny signed up to participate in the Women in Law Hackathon. The name is a bit misleading — it has nothing to do with hacking into law firm servers or promoting women in technology. The event, created by the Diversity Lab in collaboration with Stanford Law School and Bloomberg Law, will be held June 24, 2016, at Stanford Law School. It will bring together diverse teams (naturally) of law students and lawyers in different points of their careers from several law firms that will face off in a Shark Tank-style competition to share the best ideas on how to promote, retain, and advance women in law. Sure, there is a nice cash prize for the winner — $10,000 to be exact — but the real winners will be all those in attendance who can readily pilfer the ideas for their own firms.

The competition is so fierce that no team is willing to share even a hint of their ideas, which can only be described as innovative. My team alone had two great plans of action for the promotion of women that we couldn’t choose between, so we divided into smaller teams and had a mini-hackathon of our own to decide the winner. (And no I won’t share our ideas either). But gauging from the groundbreaking programs that were discussed and then built upon, what will be in the competition will go far beyond what many firms have ever attempted — even those already running innovative programs (check out firms with street cred here).

But if you look at the legal industry in general, and that includes us at O’Melveny, we still have a ways to go. That’s why events like the Hackathon that bring together so many players in Big Law have a real opportunity to move the needle. Not only does it get people talking and thinking, this event will cause those plans to move into actions. The top three winning teams will grant the prize money donated by Bloomberg Law (1st place $10,000, 2nd place $7,500, 3rd place $5,000) to their choice of a nonprofit organization that is advancing women in the legal profession and beyond. The ideas that will be shared can and should be used beyond the legal industry to promote gender equality everywhere.