A Framework for Recognizing and Overcoming Implicit Bias in the Legal Profession
-min.avif)
Maureen O’Neill serves as Consilio’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Officer. She leads the development and implementation of the company’s strategies, policies, and programs for ensuring a diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace. Maureen guides the organization in carrying out its mission of attracting and encouraging a diversity of backgrounds, experiences, and ideas, and fostering an inclusive culture among its global workforce.
Prior to joining Consilio, Maureen was a partner at Paul Hastings LLP, where she represented Fortune 100 and other multinational companies in complex employment litigation, including class and collective actions. Maureen also cochaired the Firm’s E-Discovery Practice Group. In that role, she advised clients on various e-discovery issues, and consulted internally with attorneys at the Firm on best practices for litigators engaged in e-discovery.
Summary
If you’re human, you have biases. There’s no way to change this—the human brain is evolutionarily wired to take shortcuts in our decision-making. In the modern world, these shortcuts cause all of us to have implicit or unconscious biases around race, gender, and other inherent characteristics of our fellow humans.
The important question, then, isn’t whether you’re biased; it’s what you’re doing about it. That applies equally to individuals and to the organizations in which they work. This paper explores how implicit bias affects the legal profession and what law firms and corporate legal departments can do about it.
In this Whitepaper
- What implicit or unconscious bias is
- The impacts it has in the legal industry
- Systemic responses to implicit bias
Key Insights
- The importance of bias interrupters
- The value of objective criteria
- The potential impact of the Mansfield Rule
Summary
If you’re human, you have biases. There’s no way to change this—the human brain is evolutionarily wired to take shortcuts in our decision-making. In the modern world, these shortcuts cause all of us to have implicit or unconscious biases around race, gender, and other inherent characteristics of our fellow humans.
The important question, then, isn’t whether you’re biased; it’s what you’re doing about it. That applies equally to individuals and to the organizations in which they work. This paper explores how implicit bias affects the legal profession and what law firms and corporate legal departments can do about it.
In this Whitepaper
- What implicit or unconscious bias is
- The impacts it has in the legal industry
- Systemic responses to implicit bias
Key Insights
- The importance of bias interrupters
- The value of objective criteria
- The potential impact of the Mansfield Rule
