Thinking Like Google to Increase Diversity in the Legal Profession
Mentoring programs, affinity groups, and flex-time policies that lack cultural support are not moving the diversity needle forward. Despite their best efforts, law firms are hemorrhaging women and minority lawyers before they reach the leadership ranks. To successfully change this, innovation is key. Join us for this session to learn how new and unique initiatives, such as the OnRamp Fellowship, are creating a culture of innovation and knowledge sharing that aim to boost and sustain diversity in the legal profession. As part of the session, attendees will hear about the first-ever Women in Law Hackathon and the immediate positive outcomes that came from having 54 high-level leaders from the world’s top firms working together to “hack the glass the ceiling.
About Caren Ulrich Stacy:
Founder & CEO, Diversity Lab
Caren has more than 20 years of experience in lawyer recruitment, development, and diversity with top law firms such as Arnold & Porter, Cooley, and Weil Gotshal. After co-founding and serving as President of Lawyer Metrics – which was acquired by the Access Group – to uncover the biographical and behavioral traits of high-performers through “Moneyball” analyses, Caren created the Diversity Lab. As CEO of Diversity Lab, Caren works with a team of talent experts, data scientists, and psychologists to create and experiment with innovative talent initiatives that cultivate diversity in leadership. The Lab’s work has been featured in Fast Company, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Bloomberg, The American Lawyer and on Fox News.
The Lab’s hallmark project – the OnRamp Fellowship – is the first “Returnship” ever launched for women in law firms and has now expanded into financial services and legal departments across the U.S., Australia, Canada, and the UK. To inspire others to innovate, Caren partnered with Stanford Law and Bloomberg Law to execute the inaugural “Women in Law Hackathon” – a pitch competition with 54 law firms working together to generate ideas that will increase the retention and advancement of women in law.
Caren was awarded the NALP Mark of Distinction in 2009, the College of Law Practice Management InnovAction Award in 2014, the Ms. JD “Strength in Numbers” Award in 2015, and the ABA Golden Hammer Award for Diversity in 2016. She was also elected as a Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management in 2010 – an honor awarded to fewer than 200 individuals in the country – and appointed to the Colorado Supreme Court Chief Justice’s Commission on Improving the Legal Profession in 2013. Most recently, Caren was selected from more than 500 women entrepreneurs as one of the inaugural Tory Burch Foundation Fellows.
Caren resides in Tiburon, California with her family and three Alaskan Malamutes. She can be reached at [email protected].
