Affinity groups, often called employee resource groups (ERGs), bring together employees who share a characteristic or experience: women lawyers, LGBTQ staff, veterans, parents, people from particular ethnic backgrounds. Many corporate legal departments have them, sometimes as chapters of company-wide groups, sometimes on their own.
What they do
In legal departments, affinity groups typically:
- run mentoring and sponsorship schemes for junior lawyers;
- advise on recruitment, including where to look for candidates;
- organise training, from career development to subjects such as accessibility;
- feed back to the general counsel on how policies affect different groups;
- influence outside counsel relationships, for example by asking firms about their own staffing on matters.
Do they improve performance?
The evidence is mostly about retention and engagement rather than legal output. Surveys of lawyers consistently find that people who feel isolated are more likely to leave, and turnover is expensive for legal teams. Groups that are well run, with senior sponsors and a clear purpose, appear to help with retention. Groups that exist mainly on paper do little. Hard data linking affinity groups to measures such as matter outcomes is thin, and claims that they directly raise "performance" should be treated with caution.
The legal limits
In the United States, the legal environment changed after the Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which concerned university admissions but prompted wider scrutiny of race-conscious programmes. In 2025 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Justice Department issued guidance warning that employer programmes, including ERGs, that exclude employees on the basis of race, sex or other protected characteristics may be unlawful.
Most legal departments have responded by opening groups to all employees, focusing on activities rather than membership criteria, and reviewing benefits such as mentoring places to make sure access is not restricted by protected characteristics. Lawyers advising on these programmes now need to know employment discrimination law as well as diversity practice.
Why it matters
A legal profession that reflects the communities it serves is better able to represent them. How to pursue that goal lawfully is now a live legal question in its own right.