Lending Club
Karas shares the methods she has discovered to boost female and diverse legal leadership within fintech.
The Rooney Rule is used in the football arena to make sure that when NFL teams are hiring professional staff supporting sports teams, they have some diversity options. An organization called Diversity Lab has developed something called the Mansfield Rule – a spin-off from the Rooney Rule – which is a framework to make sure that as you’re considering new talent to promote or to attract laterally, you ensure the people being considered represent the population as a whole, or represent a significant level of diversity. The format that takes is to make sure that 30% of the candidates you are screening, and 30% of the candidates that you’re bringing in to interview are diverse. We use the Mansfield Rule very heavily for recruiting, retention and promotion, including recruitment of outside counsel.
We participate in local initiatives – we’re part of the Law in Technology Diversity Collaborative, which is a collaborative of seven companies in the Bay Area that recruit diverse summer interns. These are people who law firms, for whatever reason, have not recruited from law schools but who are incredible superstars. Each company partners with a law firm. We host the intern for five weeks each, with the idea that they then have both technology company and big-name law firm experience. The hope is that they can get an offer from the law firm at the end of the summer, which is a real jump-start to their career, particularly for diverse and exceptional students who have been left on the outside by law firms in the campus recruitment process.
