I, Mark Latham, personally commit to the following:

Personal Commitments

• Promote a firm culture that fosters diversity as an inclusive concept that encompasses race, color, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, national origin, disability, and other aspects of diversity.
• Actively participate in firm activities to increase the diversity in the hiring, retention, and promotion of attorneys and the elevation of attorneys to leadership positions within our firm.
• Use my voice as a firm leader to promote appropriate diversity awareness training programs in the firm and measure the firm’s progress in the pursuit of these stated principles.
• Since achieving diversity and creating inclusive environments are evolutionary processes that require a continued effort and commitment on my part, use my voice to promote systemic changes to uproot inequity whenever the opportunity arises in our profession.

Organizational Commitments

By utilizing recognized best-practices and regularly evaluating and improving our organization’s performance on defined and measurable criteria, our firm commits to taking concrete action to achieve and assist others in achieving the following objectives:

• Address the lack of diversity in management and leadership positions with a material increase in representation;
• Develop and implement objective and unbiased criteria and procedures for achieving equity and interrupting bias in recruitment, hiring, evaluation, assignment, retention, advancement, and promotion of attorneys to shareholder, management, and leadership positions;
• Promote plans, practices, sponsorship opportunities, transparency, and accountability to achieve diversity;
• Support processes to obtain and act on feedback from employees and others regarding efforts and performance toward increasing diversity; and
• Offer professional development opportunities to support diverse attorneys at all levels throughout their careers (e.g., mentoring programs, networking opportunities, and opportunities to develop relationships with key stakeholders).