This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit insights.joinaccelpro.com

Welcome to AccelPro Employment Law, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today, we are featuring a discussion with Bonnie Levine, a partner at gunnercooke, about ways attorneys can help craft diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives that are both legally informed and effective. 

“The baseline is that lawyers don’t have a lot of background in diversity, equity and inclusion. And not only that, but because so much of diversity, equity and inclusion involves a person’s lived experiences, people will tokenize someone based on their lived experience and conflate that with acquired knowledge. The easiest example is, this person is a woman, so they know all about structural gender discrimination,” she says.

“And that’s simply not accurate. I have a diagram I use in some of my presentations that has to do with lived experiences and acquired knowledge. There’s an overlap, but these are two separate categories of knowledge. And one reason why diversity, equity and inclusion gets so stuck in this legal paradigm is that lawyers don’t understand the expertise that the DEI practitioners have.”

---

AccelPro’s interviews and products accelerate your professional development. Our mission is to improve your day-to-day job performance and make your career goals achievable.

Send your comments and career questions to questions@joinaccelpro.com. You can also call us at 614-642-2235.

If your colleagues in any sector of the employment law field might be interested, please let them know about AccelPro. As our community grows, it grows more useful for its members.