Microsoft is transforming itself by replacing outdated, manual processes with innovative, automated solutions. Microsoft is also making investments to better reflect the diversity of the world in which we live and operate. A collaboration between Microsoft’s Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA) and Microsoft Digital teams highlights how digital transformation can advance diversity and inclusion.

In 2016, the American Bar Association (ABA) officially adopted Resolution 113, which focuses on advancing diversity, inclusion, and equity. The resolution urges all providers of legal services to expand and create opportunities for diverse attorneys and clients and to direct a greater percentage of the legal services they purchase to diverse attorneys.

In furtherance of Resolution 113, the ABA conducted outreach to General Counsels of Fortune 1000 companies, universities, and local agencies, asking them to pledge to support and become signatories to Resolution 113. Signatories are required to request that law firms providing them legal services share their diversity, equity, and inclusion data via a Model Diversity Survey.

The survey provides a uniform and consistent data collection tool that helps signatories better assess practices of the law firms they engage or are considering engaging. This data collection process will also allow the ABA to compile and publish a forthcoming report providing a comprehensive snapshot. The hope is that firms’ diversity records will be weighed when purchasers retain outside law firms, and that firms moving the needle on diversity will be rewarded with more work.

Microsoft wasted no time officially endorsing Resolution 113.

“The ABA has been an amazing partner in thinking systemically about how we can scale our diversity and inclusion initiatives,” says Jason Barnwell, assistant general counsel in CELA. “We saw a specific instantiation of that in Resolution 113, which seeks to make the legal profession look more like the society that it serves. That was strongly aligned with our worldview, so we got behind it very quickly.”

Patti Worley, senior program manager in CELA’s Modern Legal team within the Office of the General Counsel, translates Model Diversity Survey data into diversity insights for CELA senior leadership. These insights allow CELA to make diversity data–driven decisions when choosing the firms with which Microsoft does business.

Until recently, getting and sharing diversity survey data wasn’t easy. Worley had to reach out to the ABA and request data for specific firms. What she got in return was a mountain of PDF files, often with handwritten notes.

Converting the data trapped in those PDF files to actionable insights wasn’t a one-person job, so Worley contracted a vendor to manually transfer the data from the PDF files to an Excel spreadsheet. Worley created Microsoft Power BI reports built upon the spreadsheet.

“From getting the PDFs to entering it into Excel to creating a Power BI, I would say it took 80 hours of work, and that’s not even including my time,” Worley says.

Adds Barnwell, “It was basically going to be impossible to collect information from our entire partner base. It would’ve required too much work because it was a manual process.”

It became obvious to the team that they needed a way to automate the process.

“We thought ‘Hey, we’re a technology company. We solve these problems all the time,’” Barnwell says. They soon reached out to Microsoft Digital, Microsoft’s IT division, to ask for help executing on their vision.

[Learn how Microsoft built an immigration tool that helps foreign national employees navigate the United States immigration system and about other low-code and no-code solutions in the article Building connected business solutions with Microsoft Power Automate.]

Automating survey data collection and reporting with Dynamics 365

The collaboration between Microsoft Digital and CELA produced a solution built entirely on Microsoft’s Power Platform and the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement module. The decision to build on Dynamics 365 was an easy one, according to Iliyas Chawdhary, a principal group software engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. The team had already built an automated survey platform for internal use, so they weren’t building from scratch.

Dynamics 365 would still have been the obvious foundation even if it had to be built from the ground up, thanks to its extensibility and vast configuration options, Chawdhary says. Rather than coding an entirely new application, the team could make use of the Dynamics 365 workflow engine to create the majority of the survey tool’s functionality, and even tie it to specific business processes.

“Dynamics 365 has most of the functionality we needed out of the box, so it didn’t take much code to extend that functionality and automate the survey collection process,” says Akshatha Pai, a software engineer in Microsoft Digital.

That foundation meant the team could deliver a solution in a fraction of the time it would’ve taken without the platform’s native capabilities.

“Because it was built on Dynamics 365, it was produced really quickly,” Barnwell says. “The prototype was up and running in weeks. Twenty years ago, I was a software engineer. To produce what Microsoft Digital created in a couple of weeks would’ve taken me many, many, months.”

The native capabilities of Dynamics 365 make it easy to administer the survey. To send out the Model Diversity Survey to firms Microsoft works with, the CELA team simply selects one or more firms from a list and the application sends out the survey. After respondents complete the survey, the data is automatically captured in Dynamics 365. From there, Worley can create reports to present the survey results to senior leadership.

“Now, the effort required to collect the data on our side is orders of magnitude less than it was, we get cleaner data, and it comes back to us really fast. And we can produce these insights that help us make much more informed decisions,” Barnwell says. “Rebecca Benavides, who leads Legal Business and Strategy, oversees our relationships with partner firms. Right now, she’s thinking about folks who should be members of our Strategic Partner Program. This kind of information is critical to thinking through who should actually be on that list, which organizations are aligned, and investing in something that we consider a strategic priority.”

Barnwell notes that in the near future, the data will be made available to Microsoft’s internal buyers, so they can make an informed decision about the partners with whom they choose to work.

Expanding the functionality of the platform for the ABA’s diversity efforts

Worley and her colleagues soon realized that their peers at other organizations had the same challenges and discussed how to empower others with this project. Worley suggested that the platform could be expanded to let the ABA centrally collect, store, and deliver diversity survey data for all their participating partners.

The platform was originally intended for a single entity (Microsoft) to disseminate the survey and collect data, but because it was built on Dynamics 365 it could be modified to service many customers. In 2019, CELA partnered with the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) to add that functionality and licensed the platform to the ABA at no cost. Using Dynamics 365 and Microsoft’s Power Platform, the LSAC automated the survey process for all Resolution 113 signatories.

“The LSAC was the right partner,” Barnwell says. “They created the most efficient approach. The ABA is fantastic at policy, and they partner with organizations like the Law School Admissions Council to do solutioning. They were invaluable. They were critical to the success of this project.”

The ABA’s version of the platform has been expanded, and because it was built on Dynamics 365 it remains highly configurable and customizable. For example, notifications can be sent to respondents at intervals configured by the admin if they haven’t yet responded to the survey—say 15 or 30 days after the survey was sent. “You can do this as an admin,” Chawdhary says. “No technical expertise needed.”

The admin can also add a custom logo, images, and text (such as privacy statements) to the survey landing page. It can even configure branching logic for the survey itself thanks to Power Apps portals, a feature of the Microsoft Power Platform.

“Say you want respondents who answer yes to question 10 to jump right to question 20. That’s all configurable from the UI,” Chawdhary says. The app also includes built-in tracking, so the ABA can see how many law firms the survey was sent to, the send date, and how many firms have responded, all at a glance. And administrators can print survey results or save them as PDF files to provide portable versions.

Moving the needle on diversity with automation

Candice Carr, a senior attorney on the Modern Legal team and member of CELA’s African-American Employee Network, notes how crucial the survey automation process will be in promoting diversity and inclusion throughout Microsoft’s legal ecosystem.

“Resolution 113 was passed in 2016,” Carr says. “We want to harness the momentum that it created and leverage tech intensity and innovation to improve the process. Those in our legal community engaged in the purchasing decision and law firm engagement models will now have access to reliable data and insights that drive streamlined decisions and actions.”

Barnwell adds that a diverse organization is a healthy organization. “Microsoft cares about diversity because it’s good business. It’s part of how we engage with the world because it gets us better outcomes and looks more like the one we want to live in,” he says.

Adapting the platform for other use cases

The LSAC created a finished product out of the extensible platform that Microsoft Digital had built. Originally, that platform had been built for Microsoft’s Modern Immigration Management System (MIMS). Also a CELA project, that solution allowed CELA to automatically submit electronic invoices to file cases, on behalf of Microsoft employees, with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). It was repurposed for the CELA team to improve analytics and reporting in law firm diversity, and could just as easily be repurposed again for other projects.

“Building this tool with Dynamics 365 meant we could make it as simple as possible,” Chawdhary says. “If we wanted to make another survey tool, we can just rinse and repeat.”

Microsoft Digital wants to make the platform available to Microsoft’s external customers and partners through the AppSource marketplace so those partners can add additional functionality to their existing Dynamics 365 deployments.

Learn how Microsoft built an immigration tool that helps foreign national employees navigate the United States immigration system and about other low-code and no-code solutions in the article Building connected business solutions with Microsoft Power Automate.