I, Michael Ferachi, personally commit to the following:

Personal Commitment

• Engage with our Members meaningfully and regularly about the value and importance to the firm of their active support of DEI, particularly with regard to mentorship, support, client teams, and business development teams.
• Meet twice a year with our current and past LCLD Fellow and Pathfinders for updates about their experiences at our firm, how we can improve our DEI goals and initiatives, and with our current LCLD Fellow and Pathfinder regarding their feedback on current LCLD programming.
• Use my position to improve fairness in our processes for talent acquisition, professional development, promotion, compensation, and appointment to firm committees.
• Formalize a process in 2021 that encourages employees to bring opportunities for improvement regarding DEI to the attention of our Chief Diversity Officer, myself, or other members of firm leadership.
• Use my voice to advocate for systemic changes to uproot inequity whenever the opportunity arises in our society and in our profession.

Organizational Commitment

• We will research and dedicate resources to sponsorship opportunities to ensure inclusion of diverse attorneys across our national platform. We will also identify and implement tools and processes to identify, hire, mentor, empower, compensate, recognize, and provide leadership opportunities for attorneys from a wide array of backgrounds, cultures, and traditions (and implement metrics to track the success of those tools and processes). Some of this work is underway and we will continue to formalize and program these initiatives.
• We will challenge ourselves to “think bigger” about the broad umbrella of inequity based on race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and physical, mental, and intellectual disabilities, and to be intentional in our use of firm language and programming to honor those experiences.
• We will increase firm resources devoted to DEI programming, and to efforts that help us recognize and minimize our implicit bias. Through our DEI Committee, firm leadership, and office management, we will make educational and community building resources accessible across a variety of platforms and disciplines, to encourage firm employees to engage in a personally meaningful way with these resources.
• We will require Practice Group Leaders to prepare DEI action plans with goals to increase diversity in their talent acquisition, professional development, promotion, composition of client teams, and the composition of business development teams, and to report on their progress at regular intervals.
• We will elevate our DEI Committee’s activities and promote the importance of a vibrant, active committee. We will support its members in advocating for a better firm and profession, and will give special consideration to service on the DEI Committee when considering candidates for leadership positions.