Through their role as a client, there is no doubt that many in-house legal departments have the power to push for greater diversity within the profession. But for many corporate counsel, the key to developing the most effective inclusiveness strategy is to join up with colleagues in a collective effort to evoke change through the entire pipeline.

Before coming to law school, the image I had of Bay Street law firms was as clichéd as they come: cigar-smoking, old, white male partners sitting around their oak-panelled boardroom discussing golf and women.

Law firms may be getting “diversity fatigue” when it comes to meeting the requirements set out by the general counsel looking to hire them, but there’s still a lot of work to be done according to a panel of in-house lawyers speaking in Toronto this past weekend.

When I first read The Globe and Mail article about the case of Ossama Aziz and Huwayda Al-Masri, I was intrigued by the complexity of the diversity issues at play — a divorced Iraqi-American woman asking the Superior Court of British Columbia to apply a Jordanian marriage contract against her Iraqi-Canadian ex-husband and issue payment of mahr that she claimed was due as a consequence of the failure of the marriage. It is a simple matter of contract, the ex-wife’s lawyer argued. But the BCSC decision is an illustration of why, on so many levels, such cross-cultural matters may not be simple at all.

Rajeev Sharma, vice president and general counsel at Ricoh Canada Inc., signs the Legal Leaders for Diversity and Inclusiveness initiative. Photo: Andi Balla

In-house lawyers at some of Canada’s largest companies have committed to lead efforts to give minorities, including people with disabilities, more access to jobs.

For Chase Barlet, attending McGill University’s Faculty of Law was not just the first step in becoming a lawyer. During Barlet’s undergraduate degree at a Mormon university, he could have been expelled for having a boyfriend. Attending McGill’s law school marked the first time he could be entirely open about his sexuality. “I went from having to be almost completely in the closet to being able to be completely out in a matter of months, which was incredibly liberating,” says the second-year law student. “At McGill, people have been nothing but welcoming and accepting.”

In the spring of 2008, we ran a story in one of our sister publications about what it was like to be a gay or lesbian associate in a law firm. The initial focus had been to find out what was really happening for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender lawyers in the big firms on Bay Street. But even just three years ago, it was very difficult to get any LGBT lawyers to speak on the record. We eventually found a few associates at large firms, not on Bay Street, to willingly talk about their experiences, but it was a tough slog.

Love to hate them but lists of the tops in any profession are still compulsive reading. Canadian Lawyer is stepping into the fray with the Top 25 Most Influential in the justice system and legal profession. As this is the first year, our list will undoubtedly be controversial but we are ready to brave the slings and arrows of the profession.

In his online article for Canadian Lawyer in January of this year, Joel Stern, deputy general counsel and director of legal services North America for Accenture’s legal group, issued a challenge to Canadian lawyers. 

 

In her monthly video editorial, editor Gail Cohen shares what she discovered during her research for the cover story on diversity in the legal profession. click here to view video