Neena Patil
Chief Legal Officer & Senior Vice President, Legal & Corporate Affairs — Jazz Pharmaceuticals
I, Neena Patil, personally commit to the following:
Representation Matters. Continue building diversity at the senior leadership level and across the organization, as well as strengthening a diverse pipeline.
- Develop communication platform for DE&I goals and purpose across the department
- Aspire to 50% of all Executive Director and above leaders in my organization represent a dimension of diversity
- Required diverse representation of candidates for all open positions within the department
- Hold our HR recruitment and agency partners accountable to our standards and expectations regarding racial diversity, gender diversity and other diversity measures.
- Focused development of high potential diverse talent including participation in LCLD fellowship programs
- Build a diverse legal pipeline include mentoring and hosting 1L summer associates/interns
Allyship. Promote equity through public acts of sponsorship and advocacy for underrepresented groups in the legal field.
- Create opportunities to educate on privilege and actively role model allyship by amplifying voices of underrepresented groups (identify tactics such as posts, articles, conferences)
- Provide my leadership team with training and resources to help educate and activate their personal commitments
- Proactively discuss allyship strategies and sponsorship with other CLOs/GCs and preferred law firm partners
Influence and Engage. Hold our outside law firms and other partners accountable to our standards and expectations regarding racial diversity, gender diversity and other diversity measures.
- Develop examples of standards and expectations surrounding diverse representation and share those with all law firms that we engage (including diverse team members of matter teams, getting matter credit, programs to support diverse law students, CLE or other presentation on diversity-related topics)
- Evaluate preferred law firms on key measures related to diversity of law firm management and seek opportunities to engage new diverse-led law firms and suppliers
- Identify ways to partners in order to enhance trust and co-create solutions together to achieve shared goals (diverse associate secondment program, new partner/new associate diversity goals)
Learn and Be Proximate. Explore how Jazz Legal Department’s internal and market-related practices continue to hold current structures in place, and what can change to take an anti-racist approach and share our insights.
- DE&I speaker series (legal department, Jazz executives and other invited external guests)
- Pro-bono and social justice initiatives