Jennie Brooks, host of the Unstoppable Together podcast chats with Senior Vice President Josh Petty of Booz Allen’s legal department about Diversity Lab’s Mansfield Rule and certification. Tune in as they discuss the diversity, equity and inclusion impacts on legal teams in the workplace, what the process entails, specific measures they adopted, and more.
Jennie Brooks:
Hello everyone and welcome to the Unstoppable Together Podcast. I'm your host, Jennie Brooks, and today I'm joined by Senior Vice President Josh Petty of Booz Allen's legal department. And we're going to be talking about Diversity Lab's Mansfield Rule and certification. Josh, welcome to the podcast, I'm so excited to talk with you today.
Josh Petty:
Jennie, thank you. I'm delighted to be here.
Jennie Brooks:
Can you first start us off by sharing with us what is the Diversity Lab's Mansfield Rule?
Josh Petty:
Sure. Well, it is building on many best practices to increase diversity in different workplaces, but the Mansfield Rule was established by Diversity Lab with the primary goal of boosting representation of historically underrepresented lawyers. And specifically, it requires certification regarding legal sourcing, how companies buy legal services, and it is a true commitment to improving diversity profile of legal departments.
Jennie Brooks:
Writ large no matter what the practice, and is that right?
Josh Petty:
Yeah, short answer is yes. It's trying to create opportunities for historically underrepresented lawyers to be visible and to increase their roles in leadership. Many legal organizations, whether it's law firms or government or in-house legal departments, like the one that I'm part of, have not done a great job historically of creating leadership opportunities for underrepresented lawyers. So what Mansfield's designed to do is to really make sure that they move the needle on that, and that they cause these organizations that employ lawyers to create more opportunities at all levels, not just entry level and the middle tier, but really in the leadership level as well.
Jennie Brooks:
Okay, cool. And under your leadership, your team worked on getting certification for Booz Allen. What does that look like?
Josh Petty:
That's right, that's right. First of all, it was a great opportunity for us to come together and talk about a really important business imperative, and one that our employees believe in. So it was a fun topic to engage in, but it also required us to challenge ourselves on some practices that perhaps we hadn't always thought through, the practices we'd inherited. But we assembled a team of approximately 40 members of the team that spanned over a year, a year and a half, to really challenge our processes on how we hire, how we promote, how we elevate, how we assign work. And our discussions around process changes extended beyond just the legal department. I mean, we looked at some of the teams we work closely with, and the reason we included so many people was we wanted to be as inclusive as possible, and we wanted to bring all stakeholders to the table to try and implement these best practices, but do so on a durable, sustainable basis, not just for a certification, but to make sure this is part of how we actually operate long term.
As a legal department joining in this endeavor, we are amongst the second cohort of legal departments pursuing the certification, which speaks to our desire to be at the forefront of change. Our long-standing commitment to DE&I will be strengthened by the Mansfield Rule as we recruit, retain and advance the next generation of legal leaders to help shape the transformational work we do as a business and for our clients.
Jennie Brooks:
As we're in these conversations through this podcast or in the community, I think there's so much conversation around the changes or the strategies to employ to increase diverse representation in a number of fields at all sorts of roles, positions and levels. What were some of the changes or strategies that you worked with the team on implementing to get the certification?
Josh Petty:
Yeah, there were a number of things that we wanted to do differently because we did want to make meaningful and durable change. Through the process of becoming Mansfield certified, we have implemented a process of formally identifying and defining high-visibility opportunities, where we want to make sure we're thinking about these HVOs as opportunities for employees to get a lot of visibility, to have a stretch assignment, potentially position them for an additional growth or promotion, and to be very purposeful about how we assign these. Likewise, when we look at promotions or hiring, we wanted to make sure that we'd tremendous amount of transparency built into the processes, but very specifically, we wanted to make sure we always had a diverse slate of candidates.
So whether it was for HVOs, new hires or promotions, we wanted to make sure that the candidate list was diverse. And ultimately, we're going to hire the best, we're going to promote the best, we're going to elevate the best. But it's about having that diverse slate and being very purposeful about that, and making sure that is second nature, and not just acting quickly sometimes, but making sure we really think this through and be very methodical about it.
Jennie Brooks:
As you're talking, I'm reflecting on just the recent Supreme Court nomination and Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. And my father was a public defender, and just my own experience and journey in watching his career, but the lessons and the perspectives and the insights that his career as a public defender brought into our home. And I was struck by the conversation around having a nominee who was a public defender, and the juxtaposition against previous nominations to the Supreme Court. In your experience, how does that show up? I mean, why is this important, not just for legal departments, but obviously it's something that can be extrapolated more broadly into organizations. So what is your view on the importance of this approach?
Josh Petty:
Well, and that's a fascinating opportunity for you to see this through the lens of your father. She's actually been fairly impactful in my life because her daughter was a classmate of my son's, and so there's been a lot of interaction there and she is extraordinary. And doing it, she's bringing a diversity of perspective, and that's what this is really about.
Jennie Brooks:
Yes.
Josh Petty:
And I believe there is a business imperative for the Supreme Court to be diverse and to have that diversity of perspective. And I believe there's a similar requirement that we have that diversity of thought and perspective in the business place as well. And this truly is about doing what's right and equitable, but also what is truly a business imperative. This is not about checking a box, this is about making sure we really consider lots of perspectives and then build the best possible outcomes, the best solutions for our clients. And ultimately, it comes down to and aligns with the company's mission, to empower people to change the world. And to do that, we have to build in equity in everything that we do, so we can empower and grow the diverse talent that we have and that we want to grow.
Jennie Brooks:
And how does the work of this, getting this certification, I mean, it strikes me that the actual certification is probably a very tangible, important step in support of, in our case, DE&I strategy and our action plans as we move forward. How does this help?
Josh Petty:
I mean, it's entirely consistent with our objectives and the true essence of VoLT. And in many respects, the objectives of VoLT and the objectives of Mansfield are entirely aligned. This happens to be a formalized way of recognizing and acknowledging the commitment, the ongoing commitment that the legal department is making, and it will have to continue to keep pace with the evolving best practices that are promulgated as a result of our commitment to Mansfield and Diversity Labs. I mean, there is a long life cycle to this. We are starting with helping nurture and advance future lawyers through our commitment and association with law students. And this summer, we had the benefit of having legal scholars, through some of the diversity programs we work with, do a portion of their internship with the company. We did that within partnership, outside counsel, but provided them an opportunity to see what it's like to be in house. And that's a very important opportunity for law students because the vast majority of law students are thinking about which law firm they're going to land with.
Jennie Brooks:
Mm-hmm.
Josh Petty:
They're saddled with a tremendous amount of debt, and the way to make the economics work is go to big law.
Jennie Brooks:
Mm-hmm.
Josh Petty:
There are other paths though, going in house, maybe not initially, maybe initially. It can be a very rewarding and very satisfying career as well, but one that's not as well understood to law students and particularly law students that are maybe the first generation lawyers and not have seen the wide array of different opportunities for lawyers. And so this is trying to help build the pipeline through these programs. We participated in a scholars program that was really quite rewarding, I believe, for the individual intern, as well as for the department at large to share their perspectives and to learn from the tremendous intern we have. I think that the legal industry, when people ask law firms, "How are you doing on diversity?" I've been asking that question for over a decade. Historically, you get a response that would be, "We're doing better than most, but we're struggling and it's hard." And they would talk about structural issues and not enough candidates. And that was the answer that we seemed to hear for about 10 years.
Jennie Brooks:
Mm-hmm.
Josh Petty:
We're challenging that now, and forcing hirers of employers of lawyers to engage differently. And I recognize this is a very big ship to move, it's a very entrenched profession, but if companies like ours who buy legal services, vote with our checkbook and we put pressure on law firms to operate and align with our values, then that can be very influential in causing change in this industry. There are questions that we will ask when we're interacting with when we're buying legal services. We can ask a number of questions to increase the diversity of the team or where you're supporting us. Sometimes that starts with a question around, and it hits right at the purse of the wallet of the law firm, but who gets the origination credit for this engagement? Who will do the work? Who will get promoted because of this work? And making sure that the team that sells the project is the team that delivers the project.
And so we truly have the diversity of thought both at the sales process as well as the delivery process. And I can tell you that even in the middle of the night, when Nancy Laben and I have had to retain lawyers for urgent matters, the question of who will deliver and will you have a diverse team has come up, and has been a deciding factor in who we work with. So it's not lip service, it's actually operationalized. And then the simple measure of ensuring we have a much more diverse pool of candidates, especially for senior positions, but at all levels that will change the composition of those leaders over time. Those are a couple of areas where I believe we can truly transform the profession and create many, many more positions to be filled by historically underrepresented lawyers.
Jennie Brooks:
I love that. In our side of the business, in the consulting world, we also see an increased demand for career mobility and diverse career experiences. Is that part of the change you think that we'll be trying to support as well, so that if you go to big law or you go in house, is there an opportunity here to enable diverse career mobility for an attorney's career path? Or what does that look like, do you think?
Josh Petty:
Yeah, short answer is yes. The type of people we hire tend to always want to take on bigger stretch assignments, they want to grow. I can't think of anybody in the department who is satisfied that this is where they want to end their career. They want to grow, they want to do more. So to cause that to be an option is through agility, it's through stretch assignments, it's through rotating people sometimes out of the comfort zone of what they know. Lawyers tend to be very specialized when they start, they tend to focus on a particular area of law. In the case of Booz Allen, they may focus on government contracting or employment law or investigations or securities law or M&A, but creating opportunities for them to focus on multiple different areas and to stretch is a way to really create opportunities for them to grow.
We have had lawyers work in the IP space and then stretch and pivot to work in the environmental social governance space, sometimes anchoring back to skills they learned many, many years ago or experiences they had when they first graduated law school. We have other examples of folks pivoting to work in adjacent areas to grow and to expand. We've moved folks from GovCon to investigations, from investigations to litigation. The skills are transferable, the judgment is at least transferable, but it's about breaking down the barriers and saying, "Hey, you can try this." And giving people a safe environment to try and to explore and to make that stretch assignment. And not feeling like they just have to be doing the one thing that they're really good at doing. It also brings immeasurable value to the organization because we can simplify the number of people we need to engage in a matter if they have the agility to handle an issue, spot all of the types of complexities of the matter and not focus narrowly on their primary or their original discipline.
Jennie Brooks:
I love that. Josh, at the end of every podcast, we give our guests some free space to share their final thoughts. What would you like to leave our audience with today?
Josh Petty:
Well, thanks for the opportunity to talk. Before going to law school, I went to business school, and I actually wasn't sure I was going to go to law school, and I think of myself as a businessman. And when I think about Mansfield and what we're doing in the legal profession, I view that most of the things we're doing here could actually be transferrable to every profession. I think that transparency and revisiting historical norms can be hard, if you really want to be honest with yourself. But ultimately it's essential to. Create more equitable processes. And I believe that we can make meaningful change through the enhancements that we've put in place. I don't consider any of them to be painful, I consider them to be good common sense that drive a really essential business imperative and it's the right thing to do for individuals. So it's a win-win.
But I really don't think this is just, say, about lawyers. It just happens to be that this is a way we could anchor onto it, but we could apply this to any number of our organization. And I think that in many respects, the organization does this. We endeavor to be as transparent and as inclusive as possible, we endeavor to empower potential, we challenge our leaders to focus on inspire belonging, we endeavor to use our very important and meaningful and voice to advance equity and resilience. And I think that what we're doing with Mansfield is very exciting, it must continue to be part of the fabric of how we operate this department, and I'm very excited about it durable and long-term positive impacts.
Jennie Brooks:
Thanks, Josh.
Josh Petty:
Thank you. I enjoyed the conversation.