Freddie Mac
Having arrived at Freddie Mac last year following five years as general counsel of MetLife, Anzaldua has brought his strategic and considered approach to diversity and inclusion with him into his new role.
In the legal industry, we have a challenge with promoting diverse talent, particularly at the senior levels of the profession. We do pretty well with diverse representation at junior levels, in part because law schools – while not graduating totally representative classes – are graduating a high percentage of women who make up more than 50% of top law school graduates and around 40% of all law school graduates. People of color are also increasingly well represented in today’s graduating law school classes. As a result, many opportunities exist to get fairly representative junior classes of lawyers into firms.
What law firms are not good at is retaining and promoting this diverse talent. If firms – or in-house legal teams – want to address this challenge and effect real change through a diversity and inclusion (D&I) strategy, several things need to work in tandem.
