Facebook now requires women and ethnic minorities to make up at least 33% of law firms' teams working on the company's matters
Ellen Rosen / New York Times : Tweets: @connorsouthard and @carnage4life Tweets: Connor Wroe Southard / @connorsouthard : What's their policy on the demographics of the NSA analysts parsing the data they've collected? http://twitter.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : I love that Facebook having blamed minorities for its inability to hire them has outsourced problem to its law firms http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's new outside-counsel mandate lands after years of internal shortfalls: its 2016 diversity report showed little progress, which the company attributed to a lack of available talent — a framing commenters like Dare Obasanjo note it has now effectively outsourced to its law firms.
The requirement also arrives ahead of [[a:931498|2018 figures showing just six African-American and ten Hispanic women among 769 US senior manager roles]] and an EEOC complaint alleging 'culture fit' rejections — making the law-firm rule a rare lever where Facebook controls the outcome directly rather than through its own hiring pipeline.
First-order effects
- Law firms handling Facebook matters must staff teams at a minimum of 33% women and ethnic minorities or risk losing the company's business — a direct revenue condition on some of the most lucrative corporate clients in tech.
Second-order effects
- Firms competing for Facebook work will need to change how they assemble deal and litigation teams, and peer clients watching the policy face pressure to adopt similar staffing requirements rather than be seen as less committed.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, diversity stops being measured only in a company's own headcount reports and becomes a procurement term written into legal engagements — shifting accountability from HR disclosures to the firms that bill for the work.
The trend: Large tech companies are moving diversity accountability beyond their own hiring reports into contractual requirements imposed on vendors and outside counsel.