DiverseCounsel is a service of the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC), and is made possible by the cooperative efforts of leaders and members of the bar associations of color which are our partners in the project: the Hispanic National Bar Association (HNBA), the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA), the National Bar Association (NBA), Native American Bar Association (NABA), the ABA Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Profession, the Minority Corporate Counsel Association (MCCA), and other organizations focused on increasing diversity in the legal profession.

DiverseCounsel is a website that will be housed within ACCA Online (www.acca.com); its "launch" mission is to help corporate counsel find more diverse outside counsel who can represent their corporate clients. DiverseCounsel will feature as its main functionality a database of self-posted listings of outside counsel of color. These outside counsel can work in minority-owned or majority-owned firms, they may be partners or associates in their firms, they may specialize in all manner of practice areas. But they can all find a home on this system which allows them to post as much or as little information about their pratices as they wish.

ACC's intention is to create a robust search engine for in-house counsel to find just the right counsel, in just the right location, with just the right skills for a given project - helping them overcome any concerns about not knowing where to find counsel of color, and most especially counsel of color with specialized expertise). The benefit we provide to outside counsel of color is to offer them a free listing on a search engine which sits in the middle of a website currently registering an average of 2.5 million hits per month from the corporate community P in other words, placing them smack in the middle of where corporate counsel go to do their networking and resource development.

Over time, ACC plans to beef up new and complimentary resources for this system: creating more robust links to other organizations with important contributions to make for those pursuing the path of diversity; offering new and exciting written resources, such as best practices, diversity "forms and policies," and survey information; and creating advanced connections networks that will allow those with expertise to be linked to those seeking it.

If you are an outside counsel of color, we hope that you will post your profile on the Post Profile section. Your posting can be edited over time to add new accomplishments, and to feature new practice expertise.

If you are an in-house counsel, we hope that you will use the Locate DiverseCounsel function to tap into our super-powered search engines. We further encourage you to post a recommendation onto the profiles of minority counsel you have used who deserve to be recognized by other corporate practitioners. And super smart senior legal officers will likely find that this database offers them an incredibly valuable tool to locate minority counsel with specific qualifications for open job positions they are seeking to fill in their legal departments.

If you are interested in diversity resources, we hope you'll look at what's here, and let us know what we can add to make this system even more robust.

And if you know of outside counsel of color who should be included on this system, tell them to come on down!

Please use this system. It's provided as yet another tool by which ACCA hopes we can -- working together -- make the legal profession more diverse, working "from the inside out."

For more information about ACC, visit our website at www.acca.com, or contact us at:

Association of Corporate Counsel
1025 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 200
Washington, DC 20036
202/293-4103
fax: 202/293-4701
email: diversecounsel@acca.com
contact person: Susan Hackett, Senior Vice President and General Counsel