Inclusiveness Program

The cornerstone of CLI’s efforts is its unique and innovative inclusiveness program.

Beyond Diversity: Inclusiveness in the Legal Workplace

Six-Step Inclusiveness Program

Beyond Diversity: Inclusiveness in the Legal Workplace is a six-step manual on how to create an inclusive workplace and gain practical skills that can be implemented within legal organizations. It was first published as a working draft at the 2008 Rocky Mountain Legal Diversity Summit. It is now in its 5th Edition and is available at www.legalinclusiveness.org. The manual was adapted pursuant to a license from The Denver Foundation and is based on the Foundation’s Inclusiveness at Work: How to Build Inclusive Nonprofit Organizations Workbook.

The six steps outlined in Beyond Diversity: Inclusiveness in the Legal Workplace are as follows:

Step One: Laying the Internal Foundation
Engaging in an inclusiveness initiative will have a lasting impact on all aspects of an organization's work and will affect everyone in your organization. Therefore, it is important to take the time to lay the proper foundation for the initiative. It requires highly strategic decisions in creating an inclusiveness committee, engaging leadership of the organization, cultivating white male allies, and designing strategies from the outset regarding how to combat apathy.

Step Two: Creating an External Support System
Succeeding in an inclusiveness initiative requires the development of an external support system, including creating an external advisory board, seeking assistance from consultants, and garnering support from organizations such as CLI and specialty bar associations. These external resources can help create an accountability mechanism and a sense of urgency for achieving stated goals.

Step Three: Integrating Inclusiveness within Your Organization
Integrating inclusiveness within your organization is only possible with a comprehensive understanding of what inclusiveness is and how it can work within your organization. This step involves developing diversity dialogues, examining the organizational culture, gathering and analyzing information, making the case for inclusiveness, and developing strategies for identifying and eliminating structural and organizational barriers.

Step Four: Integrating Inclusiveness into External Relationships & Communication
Creating an inclusive organization is not just an internal process. Communicating about your inclusiveness initiative externally plays an important role in the overall inclusiveness initiative. Do your communication and marketing plans, your website, your recruiting and hiring techniques align with your inclusiveness goals?

Step Five: Implementation
An inclusiveness action plan takes all of the knowledge your organization has developed and provides goals to embed and infuse diversity and inclusiveness throughout the organization. Measuring success in achieving those goals is also a critical element for a successful inclusiveness initiative.

Step Six: Effort & Success: The Inclusiveness Network
Learning from others who are also engaged in inclusiveness initiatives is an important component for success. CLI developed the Inclusiveness Network (IN) as a way to assist legal organizations that are formally implementing the inclusiveness manual. IN member organizations work collaboratively and share information about their successes and challenges throughout the implementation process. This group format has proved to be a powerful way to shorten the learning curve and achieve greater success more quickly. To date, there are more than 25 legal organizations in CLI's Inclusiveness Network (see the list of organizations below).

Inclusiveness Network

The Inclusiveness Network meets quarterly to share experiences and learn from one another. Dr. Arin Reeves, of Nextions (formerly The Athens Group) in Chicago, is working with these organizations in the Inclusiveness Network. Case studies following the work of each of the organizations in the Inclusiveness Network has been incorporated in the 4th edition of CLI's Inclusiveness Manual, which is available at www.legalinclusiveness.org. New updates to the case studies are now available to subscribers of www.legalinclusiveness.org. To learn more about how to become a subscriber, click here. CLI member organizations may subscriber for free.

IN08 Cohort

Eleven legal organizations – two corporate law departments, two government legal offices, and seven law firms - began implementing the CLI Inclusiveness Manual in 2008. IN08 members include:

IN08 Inclusiveness Network Members in January 2011

IN11 Cohort

Nine legal organizations – two corporate law departments and seven law firms - began implementing the CLI Inclusiveness Manual in January 2011. IN11 members include: