Inclusive Leadership
Cultivating an inclusive environment where people of all backgrounds can be authentic and belong requires culturally fluent leaders who can lead, inspire, motivate, and develop diverse teams and interrupt bias. Our approach to inclusive leadership is to educate and empower leaders to honor and leverage diversity, grow their inclusion competencies, to measure our growth and success, and to hold one another accountable. Leaders must model the behavior change we desire to see and drive the organizational change necessary for inclusion and diversity.
Ally Program. Launched in 2016, our Ally Program encourages our partners to ally with Seyfarth’s Affinity Groups of which they might not be a member. With guidance from the national Inclusion & Diversity team (DIAT), we have tasked our partners with taking at least one direct action per quarter to encourage, support, and further the inclusion and diversity efforts of their colleagues.
Leadership. Our inclusion and diversity efforts at Seyfarth are led by our firm’s managing partner in collaboration with our chief inclusion & diversity officer and two additional national co-chairs. Our extensive network of national and local DIATs includes attorneys and professional staff members from all offices. The national teams are responsible for overall planning, progress and integration of our efforts. Each local team develops customized plans, activities and local outreach. Overall progress is reviewed each quarter by the firm’s executive committee.
National DIAT Leadership:
- Chief Inclusion & Diversity Officer Mira Dewji
- National Co-Chair and Partner Laura Maechtlen
- National Co-Chair and Partner Tamaron Houston
Office DIAT Leadership:
- Kwame Benjamin, Atlanta
- Eric Greenberg, Boston
- Uma Chandrasekaran, Chicago
- Emma Mata, Houston
- Raymond Wong, International Liaison
- Daniel Whang & Jeff Wortman, Los Angeles
- Loren Gesinsky, James Yu & Tracee Davis, New York
- Christian Rowley, San Francisco
- Alonso Cisneros & Trevor Tullius, Washington, DC
Thought Leadership. Our executive leadership and inclusion and diversity leaders are sought-after panelists and authors on issues and solutions surrounding legal inclusion and diversity. Our attorneys are often featured speakers at industry conferences on substantive legal, business of law, and diversity-related topics. Our attorneys have written articles for national and firm-generated outlets about representation of women in law firm leadership, the role of lawyers in marriage equality, the need for employers to move beyond mere ADA compliance, the challenges of intersectionality in our industry, how lawyers can help close the justice gap, and how to bring design thinking into the diversity challenge.