The Brief for Diversity and Inclusion
In a firm-wide effort to improve their approach to diversity and inclusion, Clifford Chance announced a range of industry-leading diversity and inclusion targets: at least 40% female partners in the firm by 2030, and minority ethnicity targets of 15% of new partners and 30% of senior associates and business professionals by 2025.
Our challenge was to create a recruitment campaign that would showcase diverse role models from within the firm, as a way to humanise the announcement of these new targets, and so encourage students and graduates from diverse backgrounds to apply to join Clifford Chance.
Our Approach
Every law firm in the world says its people are what makes it special. Our goal with the film was to show that for Clifford Chance, this is actually true, and not just a convenient PR strategy.
We decided to tell the stories of a diverse range of Clifford Chance employees: all of them fantastic role models and almost all from a minority ethnic background. We thought that there was no better advert for the company than to channel the stories and personalities of our diverse employees.
In loose interviews, we encouraged the five employees to speak candidly about their experience at the firm, and talk about how they have faced discrimination and hardship. We didn’t want to create a whitewashed corporate image, and instead we wanted to show that Clifford Chance are being honest and open about their failings in the past, as well as their commitment to do better in the future.
To enhance this open and candid style, we decided to use behind-the-scenes visual language, with equipment, lights and a boom often in shot. We wanted to increase the feeling of authenticity and give a real sense of ‘peeking behind the curtain’.
By hearing people from a minority background speak honestly about the difficulty of the conversation around diversity and inclusivity, we created a campaign that makes Clifford Chance stand out from its peers on this issue. The campaign achieves this by eschewing the easy answers and the usual soundbites, even if it doesn’t always paint the firm in a positive light. On this issue, people deserve the complicated, difficult truth. This film helped provoke conversations about what more could be done to promote a culture of inclusion within the firm, and its success is reflected in an almost 30% increase in overall application numbers across all of their recruitment initiatives.
