Hi there,
Shannon Klinger has one of the most powerful stories I’ve heard during my journey here at PERSUIT.
Shannon is the Chief Legal Officer at Moderna, a company thrust into the public’s awareness in 2020 for its work developing the COVID vaccine.
I met Shannon back in 2018 when she was the CLO at Novartis.
One of Shannon’s passions is improving diversity, equity, and inclusion across the legal ecosystem.
Here’s some of what Shannon told me when we chatted about her journey:
“I graduated from law school in 1996. When I graduated, 18% of all law firm partners were female, and at the end of 2020, 21% were female.
“If you go deeper from a diversity, equity, and inclusion perspective, in 2020, 9% of law firm partners were African American, and 2% identified as a member of the LBGTQ+ community.
“It bothered me as a chief legal officer that we didn’t have a legal ecosystem that looked more like the communities where we lived and worked.”
I think those numbers should bother all of us in legal.
With that said, in my 35 years in legal, I have never seen a focus on improving DE&I like we've seen in the last few years.
Those changes are being driven by people just like Shannon.
I've thought often about her story as we've developed the diversity module in the PERSUIT platform — and the DE&I practices within PERSUIT as a company.
If you’d like to hear more about how Shannon and the Moderna team are working to impact DE&I, I recorded a longer conversation with her earlier this year that's available for free on our website:
