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the past two years has been the only law firm named as one of Canada's top diversity employers by Mediacorp Canada Inc. Its commitment to diversity has also contributed to Blakes recog- nition as one of Canada's top 100 employees for the past five years. "I think there's always been intellectual commitment to the idea of diversity," says Mary Jackson, Blakes' chief officer of legal personnel and professional development. Diversity is part of everything the firm does from hiring and orientation to training and communications with clients. "I think for me," she says, "diversity is effective when it's not just a separate thing; it has to be integrated into everything you do so it's just something you think about when you're dealing with people, so that you don't make cultural assumptions. And you try to make it a place where everybody can thrive regardless of their background and recognize that people have their differences [which is] a positive thing. I mean it sounds trite, but I actually really believe that." Stikeman Elliott LLP has had a formalized diversity com- mittee for five years, but it is largely in Toronto. Its other offices don't have formalized groups, says Lorna Cuthbert, chair- woman of the Toronto diversity committee. What has made its initiative successful, she feels, is having a strong 15-member team that includes associates, partners, and other staff in the firm. Like other firms that have embarked on a concentrated path to include formal diversity initiatives, Cuthbert says their mandate is plain and simple. "One, we want to attract the best and brightest. And two, we want to keep them." A number of other national and regional firms have diversi- ty initiatives of varying sizes and complexities, but our research has shown the majority do not. While many others have equity and diversity policies, they frequently do not translate into active promotion of diversity and inclusion. One firm that is taking its diversity program to a higher level is Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP, a national law firm of about 550 lawyers. After creating a program, the members of its diversity committee realized they didn't have any way to really gauge the success of their endeavours. "So the metrics become important. And we were very reluctant to roll out programs and initiatives and efforts, and frankly, expend resources and time and money on doing them, and have no idea whether we'd gotten anywhere. And so, we needed some accountability to ourselves in what we were trying to do," says Kate Broer, co-chairwoman of FMC's national diversity and inclusiveness initiative. As a result, FMC — the only Canadian law firm named as one of the 25 best employers for new Canadians in 2009 — conducted a firm-wide survey last November. It was a compre- hensive employee satisfaction survey but, in what may be a first for a large Canadian law firm, it also included a portion on self- identification in various equity-seeking groups, such as gender, disability, visible minority status, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or trans- gender, and aboriginal status. "What's important is how to mea- sure the experience of our people in the firm, and to determine whether there are differences in experience based on some of the common identifiers," says Broer. The survey was conducted over a two-week period by a third party but prefaced with what was essentially a marketing campaign to get lawyers and staff on board. The result: "We had a 78-per-cent response rate across the firm, which is — as I'm told by the experts — extremely high, especially for a first-time survey," she says. FMC plans to conduct these surveys on an ongoing basis, perhaps every year or two. Results will be used to identify "action-planning" items across the firm including the diversity and inclusiveness group. FMC is the first firm to collect metrics voluntarily. Miller Thomson LLP, ranked the 10th largest firm in Canada in Law Times' 2009 Top 20, planned to do so in its first firm-wide diversity survey in September. The firm, which only set up its diversity policy and launched a committee in 2008, decided to conduct the voluntary survey "to establish a benchmark to help orient the committee's focus going forward in certain areas, and those areas were for planning in education, in business devel- opment, in recruitment, and in community involvement," says partner and diversity committee chairwoman Gita Anand. Like FMC, Anand says the firm had a third party conduct the survey and planned to send out a "communication piece" to lay the groundwork for the survey. "We're actually going to launch it in a three-day thing called 'diversity days,'" Anand said in August. The plan was to give staff and lawyers a two- to three-week period in September to respond. FMC and Miller Thomson are unique in their efforts. The only other law firms Canadian Lawyer was able to identify that collected demographic statistics about their lawyers are in Nova Scotia, where it's mandated by law. Law firms are not only required to have employment equity policies but must report their statistics on gender, visible minorities, aborigi- nals, disabled people, and others to the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society if they want to work for the provincial government. The report to the NSBS looks at the numbers of lawyers in the firm broken down into specific groups such as indigenous black, Mi'kmaq, persons with disabilities, women, and visible minori- ties. Respondents must report on the firm's overall profile, student and articling clerk recruitment, associate appointment, and partner promotion: all broken down by categories. As a result, firms there are very cognizant of the demograph- ic makeup of their lawyers and staff and the push is always on to make the numbers more diverse, says Suzanne Rix, the pro- fessional personnel partner at Cox & Palmer. However, most don't have strong diversity initiatives in place yet. At McInnes Cooper, Bradley Proctor, the partner in charge of recruitment and development, says the firm is just starting to get its diversity initiative underway but it's still in the developmental stage. In addition, it's mandatory for every Nova Scotia lawyer to answer a self-identification question on their member's annual report; although they can pick as an answer "I choose not to answer this question." Quebec started asking a similar volun- tary self-identification question a couple of years ago. Ontario will start this January. British Columbia only asks lawyers to self-identify if they are aboriginal. STATISTICS ARE A FUNNY THING I n the United States, practically every firm of any size has its diversity statistics widely available either through NALP, the www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com OC T O BER 2009 29