Interview
Former head of legal IP at Nilfisk, Lena Ernlund Malmberg, warns against separating diversity from company culture, and highlights the systemic factors that allow in-house departments to be more diverse than law firms.
‘Diversity’ can become a pop phenomenon, a buzzword. What you need to do, if you are going to talk about it, is also to walk to the talk. You have to live it instead of communicating it all the time. I think it’s more important to look, in the strategic sense, at the person behind the ‘diversity’. It’s much more about whether that person is doing what the business needs.
I did not leave a law firm because I am a woman and I have had babies and I wanted to work less, but that is very often the way choosing an in-house career is looked upon. There is this idea that if you are a woman working in a law firm then you want to work a little bit less once you have children. But in my situation it was quite simple: I changed to the in-house role because I wanted to explore in-house life. In addition, there is often a view that in-house lawyers are those who were not cut out to be partners.
