In-house counsel advocate for diversity and inclusion in wake of #MeToo

The #MeToo movement has been a huge wake-up call for organisations worldwide, forcing them to examine their corporate culture like never before, as Ruth Green reports.

Rob Booth is General Counsel and Company Secretary for The Crown Estate, which owns and manages the British monarchy’s land and property holdings across the United Kingdom. He says the movement has highlighted companies’ duty of care to their employees. ‘The way that law firms are still structured – and lots of in-house teams too – is that we trust people’s behaviours without actually putting any checks and balances in place to ensure that those behaviours are being delivered properly’, he says. ‘This leaves you falling back on having to have whistleblowing hotlines for when things predictably go wrong’.

Booth says something as simple as office layout could help prevent such situations arising. ‘Some firms are moving forward to have more open-plan situations and are probably being more careful with their young and vulnerable employees in meeting situations, but we still haven’t tackled that’, he says. ‘People in positions of power shouldn’t exercise that power in an unchecked way and we must structure our teams and organisations to seek to avoid the worst behaviours of humanity coming out’.

Improved training and polices are regularly trumpeted as an answer to resolving workplace misdemeanours. However, a recent IBA report, Us Too? Bullying and Harassment in the Legal Profession, concluded that employees in workplaces with policies and training are just as likely to be bullied or sexually harassed as those at workplaces that don’t have such measures in place.

Charlotte Heiss is Group Chief Legal Officer and Company Secretary at RSA Insurance Group. She says training is important, but it’s only part of the solution. ‘Training isn’t the action which moves the dial’, she says. ‘It’s all about creating a culture based on personal respect and dignity. As a leadership team, you have to live that day-to-day, as well as help others live that, which may involve reprimanding and disciplining bad behaviour.’

Heiss says there’s no one ‘silver bullet’, but thinks a proactive and preventative approach is key to creating a safe working environment for all. ‘You have to look at interventions to ensure firstly that you’re attracting and retaining the best people for the job’, she says. ‘That goes back to ensuring you’re creating diverse shortlists and helping leaders recruit not only in their own image all the time, how you support parents returning from parental leave and other measures, like establishing employee resource groups, which can look at different areas and make valuable recommendations to leadership teams as to how we can make things better’. 

Rather than introducing quotas that are very prescriptive, Heiss believes targets can be much more effective. ‘I do believe what gets measured gets done’, she says. ‘We’ve signed up to targets, for instance to have 33 per cent women in our management group globally. We’re making progress towards that and management are accountable to the Board on this issue, which helps focus the mind when you’re recruiting and running your teams.’

RSA is among more than 70 UK and European general counsel that have signed an open letter promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace and urging law firms that they partner with to adopt similar best practices. It has also signed up to the Women in Finance Charter, an initiative by the UK government to improve gender balance across the financial services industry. 

Booth believes it’s incumbent on general counsel to ensure their company’s best practices are reflected in their external counsel. He says this was all too clear following revelations in January 2018 of a male-only fundraising dinner in London where hostesses were groped, sexually harassed and propositioned. ‘As a general counsel who spent a not-that-fun morning phoning around all of his law firms to make sure that none of their people had been at the President’s Club, I can tell you that if we as an organisation want to be held out as a responsible business, that also includes our supply chain', he says.

Although Booth was satisfied that none of his external counsel had participated or had links to the event, he says the incident was a reminder that there’s no room for complacency. ‘If law firms want to promote that and push the collaboration agenda they have to find ways to deal with these issues’, he says. And the onus isn’t just on law firms, he stresses: ‘I really don’t see this as a law firm problem that doesn’t cascade across into in-house teams and business more broadly, particularly when legal spend is such a significant proportion of a company’s overall overheads. The whole of the corporate world needs to wake up and think about these issues.’

Philip Berkowitz, Co-Chair of the IBA Diversity and Equality Law Committee and Practice Co-Chair of Littler’s International Employment Law Practice Group, says it’s clear that #MeToo has shifted the conversation towards improving employee rights. ‘I don’t think anyone would say that #MeToo hasn’t had a positive impact’, he says. ‘Employers and employees feel strongly that individuals should be able to do their job without impediment. When that doesn’t happen, it interferes with the best interests of everyone’.

Heiss agrees that #MeToo has helped sharpen the focus of the legal industry on issues that have long plagued the profession. ‘It has rightly yielded questions around the role of general counsel and lawyers and the ethics behind different decisions’, she says. ‘I think if anything, #MeToo may have made the legal profession’s job easier as it can help highlight the potential reputational implications to the business of not doing “the right thing”’.