Better Performance Analytics Would Help Diversify Law Firms

To help diversify legal teams – and more effectively promote lawyers based on current performance – the legal industry should turn to Words With Friends, argues Paul Lippe, former CEO of Legal OnRamp and member of Elevate Services’ Advisory Board. Words with Friends, a mobile app game that is similar to Scrabble, gives detailed and transparent performance evaluations, Lippe says, which allows him to see how he rates against competitors and gives him information he can use to improve. He argues that the lack of similarly transparent data points for lawyers’ performances has allowed the current system to evolve, which prioritizes past performance (what law school an attorney attended; academic performance; elite clerkships) over current performance, and continues to lean on implicit bias. “[D]iversity is one of a number of reasons law urgently needs to improve how it measures performance,” Lippe writes in ABA Journal. “Otherwise, we will always measure performance in ways that reinforce and maintain the status quo, which may be why law lags in diversity.”