Gold Sponsor

About K & L Gates

www.klgates.com

K&L Gates’ distinguishing areas of strength are simple:  Our people and our culture.  We have offices located across five continents, and the halls of those offices are filled with some of the most talented and experienced lawyers in the world, capable of handling our clients’ most challenging legal needs.  The scope and depth of our global platform is something of which we are very proud, but even more important to us, our lawyers – indeed, all of our allied professionals – are good people who want to do good things, for our clients and for each other. We work hard to establish and maintain relationships with our colleagues and our clients that are built on trust and a shared dedication to professional excellence, enabling us to effectively and efficiently guide and support our clients across their enterprise risks.

 

Why did you decide to become a NBA-CLS sponsor?

K&L Gates is proud to support the mission of the National Bar Association. As a global law firm, K&L Gates has built a workplace that is intrinsically diverse in experiences, perspectives, and ideas. Our commitment to diversity and inclusion is the force that propels and supports our dedication to our people and our culture. At K&L Gates, one of our core values is to create and sustain a diverse workforce and an inclusive culture that encourages satisfaction and productivity for all of our lawyers and professional staff. It is our strategic priority to maintain an inclusive culture that enriches the experience of our lawyers.

 

Additional Information

We believe the tone at the top is set by a firm’s leadership, and a firm’s culture is directly influenced by its leadership. At K&L Gates, we have two active committees dedicated to the firm’s diversity and inclusion efforts. These committees strive to ensure that diversity and inclusion is a consistent consideration in firm leadership, management practices, human resources, marketing activities, financial decisions, and community and global communications.

Firmwide Diversity Committee consists of diverse partners across the globe aptly representing the cultures of our colleagues. The Chair of the Diversity Committee is also the Co-U.S. Managing Partner, Seattle Managing Partner and a member of the global Management Committee.

Firmwide Women in the Profession (WIP) Committee is led by a senior equity partner at the firm and consists of global and local representations. The mission of the committee is to identify and promote ways to develop and empower our women lawyers and Allied Professionals.

Goals and action steps are analyzed and evaluated on a regular basis by the two committees, reporting quarterly on the committees’ progress to the firm’s Management Committee and overseeing robust budgets and our employee resource groups including, women lawyers; LGBTQ+ employees and allies; racially/ethnically diverse lawyers; working parents; veterans; and differently-abled lawyers.  Together, the two committees spearhead programs ranging from participating in Diversity Lab’s Mansfield Rule 4.0 and hosting a virtual business development training program to high performing women, including women of color, associates in the U.S. to assisting transgender individuals with name changes in Melbourne, Pittsburgh, and Sydney. We strongly believe we build better teams, forge better client relationships, and provide better customer service because of our diverse team of professionals.