Faegre Drinker Signs on to Participate in Mansfield Rule 5.0

Faegre Drinker is proud to join more than 160 large law firms in the U.S. and Canada that have signed on to participate in Diversity Lab’s Mansfield 5.0 Certification process, launching July 2021.

The firm, which is currently taking part in Mansfield 4.0 through 2021, has participated in the Mansfield Rule since its inception in 2017 and has been consistently recognized as a Mansfield Certified Plus firm – one of the “trailblazing law firms” that have demonstrated meaningful progress in creating diverse leadership teams and developing diverse pipelines to leadership.

The goal of the Mansfield Rule is to boost the representation of historically underrepresented lawyers in law firm leadership. Now entering its fifth year, the Mansfield Rule has become the standard by which law firms track and measure that they have affirmatively considered at least thirty percent women, lawyers from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups, lawyers with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ lawyers for top leadership roles, senior-level lateral hiring, promotions into the equity partnership, and participation in client pitch meetings.

Similar to previous years, this latest iteration of the Mansfield Rule includes new challenges to continuously push the boundaries necessary to boost diversity in law firm leadership. New for Mansfield 5.0, firms are required to:

• Track their candidate pools in a disaggregated manner, prompting them to measure the impact of the Mansfield Rule by each underrepresented group. Firms must also include an option for Middle Eastern/North African identity, a demographic often over-looked by current self-identification options.
• Consider at least 30% underrepresented lawyers for nominations to Chambers USA to increase the external visibility of underrepresented lawyers with clients and in the marketplace more broadly.
• Consider 30% underrepresented individuals when hiring and promoting C-level or other senior-level professional staff roles.

In addition, law firms pursuing Mansfield Certification Plus—which indicates that they have not only considered, but achieved thirty percent representation of under-represented lawyers in many of the Mansfield Rule’s categories—will be asked to heighten the transparency of their partner compensation criteria and processes by publishing and making them available to all lawyers in the firm.

Faegre Drinker holds itself accountable for progress on building a diverse workforce. In addition to the Mansfield Rule, the firm also relies on national benchmarking surveys to track progress and in 2021, was named a “Best Law Firm for Women” by Seramount (formerly Working Mother), recognized as a ‘Best Place to Work for LGBTQ Equality’ by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s 2021 Corporate Equality Index, and in 2020 was ranked in Law360’s  Glass Ceiling Report, and was among 48 U.S. law firms to receive Gold Standard Certification by the Women in Law Empowerment Forum in.

For more information about Mansfield Rule 5.0 and a new pilot for the program launching in the United Kingdom, read Diversity Lab’s press release.