Bright Spot: Ogletree, Deakins’ Family Leave Policy and Supporting Initiatives
In an effort to inform and inspire our members and friends, we often share diversity and flexibility Bright Spots – those small or large successes that impact an organization in a positive way. We believe that important diversity and flexibility initiatives can truly impact your organization’s bottom line, recruitment and retention capabilities and employee satisfaction.
BRIGHT SPOT
Ogletree Deakins’ gender-neutral Family Leave policy is an impressive Bright Spot. Comprehensively developed, this policy provides a wide range of support mechanisms for attorneys during and following their family leave.
Ogletree’s family leave initiative includes the following benefits:
- A gender-neutral Paid Parental Leave (PPL) benefit of up to 16 weeks salary is provided to any attorney on an approved leave after the birth, adoption or foster care placement of a child.
- To further help ease an attorney’s transition back to work after the leave, the firm provides an additional on-ramping program which allows for reduced billable hours for a limited period of time. Attorneys are not required to formally request on-ramping and the program does not affect compensation.
- Attorneys who are parents also have access to an on-demand back-up childcare service in the event of last minute childcare needs. (This service is also available for the care of an aging parent or other adult dependents.)
- A “Milk Stork” program supports nursing mothers by coordinating the shipment of milk when the mother is traveling on firm business.
- A business resource group, ODFamily, serves as a resource to assist parents transitioning back to work.
- Each new parent has access to an e-course that helps new parents prepare for the transition back to work and offers web community support for questions and resources.
Bright Spot: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Billable Hours
In an effort to inform and inspire our members and friends, we often share diversity and flexibility Bright Spots – those small or large successes that impact an organization in a positive way. We believe that important diversity and flexibility initiatives can truly impact your organization’s bottom line, recruitment and retention capabilities and employee satisfaction.
BRIGHT SPOT – Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Billable Hours
Recent Bright Spots in the legal community are new Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Hours Policies implemented by several law firms in which employees can accrue billable hours towards their annual target by participating in efforts that advance DE&I.
Some examples of projects that may qualify for DE&I billable hours include:
IMPACT
We are happy to report that we’ve seen a very positive Ripple Effect to these new policies and many firms are now jumping on the DE&I billable hours bandwagon. Examples of firms that have instituted a DE&I billable hours policy include (but are not limited to): Ogletree Deakins, Davis Wright Tremaine, Cooley and Hogan Lovells, as well as one of the early pioneers of this trend Dorsey & Whitney who implemented their policy in 2019.
It’s important to note that Reed Smith seems to be one of the first firms to extend their policy to its business professionals.