The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (“CLOC”) recognized Digitory Legal (“Digitory”) alongside its client Kaiser Foundation Health Plan (“Kaiser”) as the 2022 Legal Innovation in Operations (LIO) Project award recipient. This award celebrates a program implemented by Digitory to further advance Kaiser’s commitment to Equity, Inclusion & Diversity (“EID”) through data optimization and process improvement.

Digitory worked alongside Kaiser to improve overall data hygiene across its legal panel enabling the company to develop a deeper understanding of the quality of work that diverse lawyers are doing by separating the strategic, success-building work from administrative tasks.

This data-driven EID approach is woven into the legal department's fabric from outside counsel guidelines to engagement management processes. Digitory worked with Kaiser to set clear guidance in their guidelines to ensure that law firms provide quality time narratives and updated timekeeper diversity information.

An important message for driving change in EID across the legal industry is that not all work provides career-advancing opportunities. Digitory introduced Kaiser’s legal service providers to the concept of “Mindful Staffing” which requires outside counsel to provide detailed staffing plans at the outset of the engagement to support thoughtful work allocation and the equitable distribution of career-advancing roles to diverse attorneys.

Digitory’s actionable diversity data analytics supports Mindful Staffing by enabling clients like Kaiser to identify where there are gaps in representation. With high-quality data, clients across the legal industry can take action to fix implicit bias at the source - staffing and work allocation.

Notes

• CLOC is the leading organization dedicated to transforming the business and practice of law.

• The Legal Innovation in Operations (LIO) Project was developed to honor innovation and design excellence in legal operations and recognize those contributing to the evolution of the global corporate legal ecosystem.

• Digitory Legal, now part of BigHand, is an award-winning cost analytics platform designed to help law firms and in-house legal departments leverage their data to succeed in an evolving legal market.

• Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. is a national healthcare provider. Kaiser, based in Oakland, CA., provides customers a wide variety of services from preventative care, emergency care, immunizations, and pharmacy services.