Verona Dorch, Chief Legal Officer, Peabody Energy

Verona Dorch, Chief Legal Officer, Peabody Energy

Peadbody Energy

Dorch discusses her approach to building diversity pathways – both inside and outside the legal team.

The legal department serves the business and other functions, so it’s a great opportunity to put diversity in front of them. Our clients may get very comfortable with one lawyer, or one type of lawyer, but we are really pushing – for example, ‘This person is the expert on this topic’, or ‘This is someone that we’d like you to work with’ – and making sure that we are providing our lawyers with good exposure.

At the end of the day, decisions are not only made by me – I don’t get to pick the next GC on my way out; it’s a decision the CEO is going to make, so they will need adequate exposure to a number of people. It will be a decision the rest of the executive team and board is going to weigh in on – so how am I ensuring that folks I think could be candidates, no matter what their developmental path, are getting the attention that they need?

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