by Cynthia Price
Legal News
The Grand Rapids Bar Association’s Managing Partners Diversity Collaborative launched with great fanfare in 2011.
Unlike many other initiatives which fail to make good on their promising starts, the collaborative is well-structured, diligently planned, and meticulously implemented.
The recent introduction of the grabLAW campaign is the most visible indication of that dynamic to date. Both its impressive website and the elements on its website, and the overall campaign required a lot of hard and smart work.
In June 2011, the managing partners of twelve law firms and then-president of the Grand Rapids Bar Association (GRBA) Mark Smith signed an agreement to work together on diversifying the composition of the local legal community. Those firms are Barnes and Thornburg, Clark Hill, Dickinson Wright PLLC, Dykema, Foster Swift Collins and Smith, Miller Canfield, Miller Johnson, Price Heneveld, Rhoades McKee, Smith Haughey Rice and Roegge, Varnum, and Warner Norcross and Judd.
Sticking to the aggressive timeline they had already established by starting to meet in Jan. 2011 and developing the agreement and goals by June, the participants developed a detailed five-year action plan by March 2012. The partners put resources behind its implementation, and the GRBA approved it.
The goals of that plan are: “[i]ncreasing the number attorneys of color in our organizations within five years; [i]mproving the rate of retention and advancement of female attorneys and attorneys of color in our organizations; and [e]xpanding the pipeline of persons of color who enter law school and the profession.”
Based on those goals, the plan fleshed out three Critical Issue areas: Pipeline Development, Recruitment of Diverse Candidates, and Retention of Female Attorneys and Attorneys of Color. Committees corresponding to each had already been established.
Three Grand Rapids firms supply the attorneys who facilitate those committees: Sal Pirrotta of Miller Johnson convenes Pipeline Development, Rodney Martin, Warner, Norcross and Judd, convenes the Retention Committee, and Elizabeth “Joy” Fossel of Varnum convenes Recruitment.
The Recruitment Committee is responsible for creating the grabLAW campaign. Fossel explains, “This resulted from a specific step in the action plan. The committee had a number of tasks involving a way to market Grand Rapids beyond its borders so people know what a wonderful place we have here.”
Fossel gives the managing partners themselves credit for bringing the grabLAW campaign to fruition. The firms all contributed to funding its development. “That’s where the rubber meets the road, or sometimes,” she laughs, “where it doesn’t meet the road. The managing partners have been behind this 100%; they recognize that it will benefit all of the firms.”
The plan also called for pulling together a group of the marketing professionals to help determine how to proceed further. “We put together a subgroup of the marketing professionals in probably half the firms in the collaborative,” Fossel says. That subgroup recommended using the service of a public relations agency, and eventually Seyferth and Associates was hired.
Professionals from Seyferth shaped the whole grabLAW campaign. They used focus groups of people in the same demographic as those potentially interested in moving to the area for employment to narrow down what would work best to attract them.
The result is a slick website which includes a brief but effective video — Fossel says there are plans for more — and several pertinent stories from attorneys who work and live in Grand Rapids and love it. One intention of the site is to drive traffic to less “static” social media sites, which the participating firms will keep updated.
The website is www.grablaw.org and it cross-links with the GRBA site, www.grbar.org.
There are also brochures and other written materials to help in person recruiters.
Fossel stresses that part of the strategy is to provide resources for, in particular, millennials who seek out information themselves. “Research is very clear that there’s a certain amount of traffic just from people searching out legal careers in various communities,” Fossel says.
The campaign also calls for promoting the site and social media pages through colleges, at job fairs and recruitment events, and through partnering with other organizations such as Hello West Michigan.
Grand Rapids lags behind national statistics in percentages of women and “minorities” at the partner level, according to NALP, the Association for Legal Career Professionals, which has been providing statistics since the 1990s. However, between 2010 and 2012, there was a very minimal increase in the percentages of women and minority women partners, for example, though comparisons are made difficult by the number of firms reporting — ten in 2010, only eight in 2012.
The new initiative and the managing partners diversity collaborative project as a whole have their work cut out for them, but clearly getting the word out is critical.
Fossel says that an excellent article in the American Bar Association Journal has been immensely helpful in drawing attention to the campaign. She says the ABA article in and of itself did a great job of promoting how wonderful Grand Rapids is.
Comments Fossel, “I think Grand Rapids offers a benefit that you can’t find anywhere else: a sophisticated level of practice along with the opportunity to get involved in your community, find a great place to live, and have a great work-life balance. That’s what we mean by ‘Achieve’ and ‘Balance.’ That opportunity is what distinguishes us, and that’s what we want other people to understand.”
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