The "Mansfield" Firm Craters

A nice piece of news ends the week for HR Law Guy- Diversity Lab LLC, a for profit DEI consultancy, has shut down. The California-based company specialized in “certifying” law firms as properly diverse under its so-called Mansfield certification program.

From their earliest days, I've maintained that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs violate the most basic tenets of US anti-discrimination law.  Virtually every one of these programs, which rely on the concept of intersectionality (the idea that there is a sliding scale of righteousness in life decisions that is measured by individuals’  race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and other protected categories), ultimately devolve into some kind of quota system using suspect classes as a determinant in hiring, firing, promotion or other employment decisions. 

Jumping on the post-George Floyd racial equity bandwagon, Diversity Lab set up a certification program for law firms requiring them to have candidate pools made-up of at least 30% of individuals with protected characteristics, and a “certification plus” program requiring firms to certify that they actually implemented the 30% employment goals in their final employment decisions.  These quota systems were called “Mansfield certifications”, and were embraced by a number of major law firms anxious to showcase their bona fides as true participants in the social justice movement.

There were two problems with this approach. The first was that it relied on using protected categories as a basis for employment decisions, in violation of federal and state laws. The second was that this type of coordinated and collusive conduct by businesses, even under the social justice umbrella, had the potential to run afoul of antitrust laws.  

These programs work fine under a federal administration that regularly turns a blind eye to bigotry of the proper kind. When a new administration that was actually focused on enforcing federal discrimination law came into office, things began to change quickly.  DOJ, the EEOC, and the FTC all began investigations into these protected factor based hiring systems. The end result was that law firms began backing away from Diversity Labs and rethinking their quota systems in an effort to avoid federal scrutiny. That was the end of the company.

I can’t be too upset about the result—the irony of law firms jumping on the discrimination train was almost too much.