Bowles Rice's Respect Credo has long expressed some of the firm's most enduring values:
The firm recognizes the value and contribution of every individual of the team and requires that every person treat all others with respect and consideration.
In service of these core values, Bowles Rice is committed to fostering diversity, inclusion and equal opportunity among our attorneys, staff, clients and vendors, understanding that doing so enhances the quality of our legal services and enriches our workplace. We understand that diversity provides us with differing perspectives and ideas and new ways to problem solve, and an inclusive environment offers a better scope of legal advice for our clients. Cultivating team members with a range of backgrounds, talents and perspectives not only augments service to our clients and communities, but it is also the right thing to do.
Understanding Cultural Competency
We believe a law firm should be culturally competent. At a basic level, cultural competency is a framework that enables individuals and teams to work effectively across cultures. But more than that, cultural competency means having the capacity to value diversity, to manage and leverage the dynamics of difference, to acquire cultural knowledge and to integrate the cultural contexts of our employees, our clients and our communities. Bowles Rice has demonstrated a history of cultural competency, and we are committed to evolving and improving our achievements in this area.
Existing Diversity Framework
We understand that recruiting and retaining a diverse workforce is key to our goal of fostering diversity, inclusion and equal opportunity. Bowles Rice recruits, develops and promotes our attorneys and staff without regard to race, gender, religion, color, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, national origin, familial or socioeconomic status. The firm strives for an inclusive environment, respecting and valuing both the differences and the similarities among our team members. Within the firm, we seek to foster an environment that attracts and retains the most outstanding professionals, believing that individual achievement and satisfaction will result in exponentially greater success for the firm and, ultimately, the communities in which we live and work. Bowles Rice is an equal opportunity employer and dedicated to maintaining a nondiscriminatory climate in which we administer all personnel guidelines and practices equitably and base personnel decisions solely upon an individual's qualifications, experience, abilities, skills and interests.
To that end, we have taken steps to create a firm of attorneys and staff with various backgrounds and perspectives through our recruiting efforts. We have expanded the number and geographic locations of law schools at which we recruit, seeking to increase diversity among the candidates we interview. To effectively integrate new attorneys into our culture, we provide attorney mentors to summer associates and permanent associates with whom the attorneys meet, one-on-one, for the first years of practice. Our goal is to ensure a smooth transition into the practice of law and professional life at Bowles Rice.
Consistent with our firm's mission to retain talented attorneys and staff, we are committed to ensuring that, once here, women and minority attorneys and staff are provided with opportunities to flourish. We have steadily increased the number of women and minority attorneys in practice and group management, executive leadership and other firm governance. In fact, three of our four administrative directors charged with firm operations are women, including our executive director. We support alternative work arrangements in an effort to retain those who require flexible and part-time schedules, and our policies support those members of the firm who serve in the military. We also participate in a wide range of business, civic, charitable, political and education organizations and endeavors that promote inclusion and diversity.
