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Since 2008, Microsoft’s Law Firm Diversity Program (LFDP) has been a vehicle for the company to partner with our strategic partner law firms to advance diversity in the legal profession. We report annually on the program’s results, spotlight top performances among our law firm participants and provide insight into how we will evolve the program in the next year to drive continued progress.

This year, we are pleased to share that we continue to see diversity gains by our program participants and to announce that Perkins Coie and Latham & Watkins have earned special recognition for their diversity achievements and contributions to our program.

We’re also announcing that in this fiscal year, we will expand the program bonus pool and the number of law firms that can participate to drive more and faster progress with a greater focus on African American, Black, Hispanic and Latinx representation in leadership.

Continued progress in 2020

The LFDP is an incentive-based program that rewards participating firms for increasing diversity within the firms, with a specific focus on:

• diverse attorneys working on Microsoft matters
• diversity within the firm’s partnership
• diversity within the firm’s executive management

This last fiscal year, participating firms were eligible to earn a full bonus of up to 2 percent of their annual fees by meeting diversity targets in each of these areas. For purposes of the program, we define increases in diversity as greater inclusion of women, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, and veterans.

For the 12^th consecutive year, diversity has increased within the teams working on Microsoft matters from participant firms. This year’s gains contributed to nearly a 30 pecentage point overall increase in the percentage of hours worked by diverse attorneys on our matters since the program launched. Since we added a focus on diversity in firm leadership to the program in 2015, diverse representation among management committees has increased by 12 percentage points, and diverse partner composition has grown from 33% to over 38%.

This growth represents commitment, innovation and partnership across our partner firms participating in the program. Given the health and economic crises caused by COVID-19 this year, we are especially grateful to our partner firms for their steadfast focus on creating a more diverse and inclusive industry and legal system during this time. Though we celebrate the gains we have made within the program, we have much more work to do as individual organizations and a profession, and it is as important as ever that we do not lose focus.

Our 2020 Law Firm Diversity Program award recipients

This year, as last year, we have two special awards within the program:

• “Top Performer” for the firm that made the greatest gains across the diversity focus areas for the program
• “Most Innovative” for the firm recognized, by a vote of their peers within the program, for exceptional innovation in efforts to increase diversity and inclusion at their firm

We are pleased to share that Perkins Coie is this year’s Top Performer, and for the second year in a row, Latham & Watkins is our LFDP Most Innovative firm.

Top Performing Law Firm – Perkins Coie

In the last five years, Perkins Coie has achieved impressive progress against LFDP program goals, growing diverse attorney hours on Microsoft matters by 12.3 percentage points (from 56.7% to 69%), and a 10.3 point increase in overall diverse partner representation at the firm (from 33.6% to 43.9%). Perkins Coie has also made great progress in diverse representation on its management committee, with over 64% of their committee members identifying as women, minorities, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities and veterans. Perkins Coie’s proactive approach earned the firm recognition on Fortune’s list of Best Workplaces for Diversity last year and has positioned the firm as a leader for diversity in the profession. We celebrate Perkins Coie’s efforts and congratulate their earning of this year’s award.

Most Innovative Law Firm – Latham & Watkins

The LFDP Most Innovative award was created last year to incentivize real, meaningful and sustained progress through innovation as a core principle for the LFDP. For the second consecutive year, Latham & Watkins has been recognized by a vote of its peer participants as the LFDP Most Innovative firm. This year, the firm won over its peers with two new initiatives intended to create a culture of allyship at the firm and reward firm timekeepers for investing their time in diversity and inclusion efforts.

Encouraging allyship  

Latham & Watkins created an allyship campaign that aims to provide practical steps on how to be an ally, highlight examples of allyship at the firm and facilitate “safe space” opportunities for everyone to engage in meaningful dialogue about diversity and inclusion, and allyship. The firm anticipates the campaign’s launch in the coming year.

Earning credit for diversity and inclusion  activities  

Latham & Watkins launched a program starting this year where associates and counsel can earn up to a certain number of bonus-eligible hours working on activities.  In this way, Latham & Watkins understands that providing this credit is an incentive that underscores not only the importance of diversity and inclusion contributions, but also helps increase engagement, both of which are key toward making headway in this space.

We believe that innovative ideas and approaches are necessary to move our profession forward. We also believe that when it comes to diversity and inclusion, sharing ideas will help us all to accelerate our progress. We celebrate Latham & Watkins’s commitment to innovation and sharing, so that others can learn from their efforts.

Expanding the Law Firm Diversity Program to drive greater progress

While we are grateful for all the progress in the last year and in the last 12 years, we can’t lose sight of the fact that there is much progress to still be made. Indeed, the data on this is quite sobering. Numerous reports from the last year find that we are far from the diverse and inclusive profession that we need to be.

For example, though Asian American, African American and Black, Latinx and Hispanic, and Native American people comprise between 35% and 40% of the U.S. population, Law360 reports in its 2019 snapshot that only 10% of partners at the firms it surveyed identified with these communities.

The data also reflects that the pace of change for some demographics has been too slow, particularly in leadership and for African American, Black, Hispanic and Latinx people. The National Association for Law Placement reports that representation of Black or African American partners rose only a quarter of one percentage point in the 10 years between 2009 and 2019, from 1.7% to 1.9%. Similarly, in the same period, representation for Latinx partners grew less than one percentage point, from 1.6% to 2.5%. At this rate of change, reaching proportional representation for these communities will take more than 50 years. We must make faster progress, and that progress must be inclusive of all diverse communities.

With this context in mind, Microsoft is taking three steps to evolve the LFDP this year:

1. Inviting more firms to participate in the program
   In past years, the program has been open to our 12 to 15 strategic partner firms. This year, we are expanding the program to include more than 20 additional firms who also do a substantial amount of work for us in the U.S. Similar to our strategic partner firms that have been longstanding participants, the firms that are new to the program will be rewarded for year-over-year growth in diversity on the team that services Microsoft’s matters, within their leadership at the partner level, and within their management committees.
2. Increasing the financial incentive for progress
   Starting this year, we are increasing the potential bonus within the program for strategic partner participants from 2% to 3% of their annual fees.
3. Putting a greater focus on growth of African American, Black, Hispanic and Latinx people in leadership
   One third of the bonus that firms are eligible to earn will be allocated for growth in representation of African American, Black, Hispanic and Latinx peoples within the firms’ partnership ranks.

Additionally, we are working with our law firm partners in the United Kingdom to pilot a version of the LFDP in that region. We hope to share what we learn from that pilot next year.

With this latest evolution of the program, we increase our commitment to diversity and inclusion by strengthening our partnership with our law firms to make continued progress together over the next year.

Sources and where to learn more about the journey toward increasing diversity in the legal profession:

The legal profession must not let COVID-19 weaken our commitment to diversity

Left Out and Left Behind on the experiences of women of color in the profession published by the ABA Commission on Women

NALP 2019 Report on Diversity in U.S. Law Firms

2019 Law360 Diversity Snapshot

Tags: diversity, Law, Law Firm Diversity Program, LFDP

Today, Microsoft is releasing a new annual report, called the Digital Defense Report, covering cybersecurity trends from the past year. This report makes it clear that threat actors have rapidly increased in sophistication over the past year, using techniques that make them harder to spot and that threaten even the savviest targets. For example, nation-state actors are engaging in new reconnaissance techniques that increase their chances of compromising high-value targets, criminal groups targeting businesses have moved their infrastructure to the cloud to hide among legitimate services, and attackers have developed new ways to scour the internet for systems vulnerable to ransomware.

In addition to attacks becoming more sophisticated, threat actors are showing clear preferences for certain techniques, with notable shifts towards credential harvesting and ransomware, as well as an increasing focus on Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Among the most significant statistics on these trends:

• In 2019, we blocked over 13 billion malicious and suspicious mails, out of which more than 1 billion were URLs set up for the explicit purpose of launching a phishing credential attack.
• Ransomware is the most common reason behind our incident response engagements from October 2019 through July 2020.
• The most common attack techniques used by nation-state actors in the past year are reconnaissance, credential harvesting, malware and virtual private network (VPN) exploits.
• IoT threats are constantly expanding and evolving. The first half of 2020 saw an approximate 35% increase in total attack volume compared to the second half of 2019.

Given the leap in attack sophistication in the past year, it is more important than ever that we take steps to establish new rules of the road for cyberspace: that all organizations, whether government agencies or businesses, invest in people and technology to help stop attacks; and that people focus on the basics, including regular application of security updates, comprehensive backup policies and, especially, enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA). Our data shows that enabling MFA would alone have prevented the vast majority of successful attacks.

In this blog post I’ll summarize some of the most important insights in this year’s report, including related suggestions for people and businesses.

Criminal groups are evolving their techniques

Criminal groups are skilled and relentless. They have become adept at evolving their techniques to increase success rates, whether by experimenting with different phishing lures, adjusting the types of attacks they execute or finding new ways to hide their work.

Over the past several months, we have seen cybercriminals play their well-established tactics and malware against our human curiosity and need for information. Attackers are opportunistic and will switch lure themes daily to align with news cycles, as seen in their use of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the overall volume of malware has been relatively consistent over time, adversaries used worldwide concern over COVID-19 to socially engineer lures around our collective anxiety and the flood of information associated with the pandemic. In recent months, the volume of COVID-19-themed phishing attacks has decreased. These campaigns have been used for broadly targeting consumers, as well as specifically targeting essential industry sectors such as health care.

In past years, cybercriminals focused on malware attacks. More recently, they have shifted their focus to phishing attacks (~70%) as a more direct means to achieve their goal of harvesting people’s credentials. To trick people into giving up their credentials, attackers often send emails imitating top brands. Based on our Office 365 telemetry, the top spoofed brands used in these attacks are Microsoft, UPS, Amazon, Apple and Zoom.

Additionally, we are seeing attack campaigns that are being rapidly changed or morphed to evade detection. Morphing is being used across sending domains, email addresses, content templates and URL domains. The goal is to increase the combination of variations to remain unseen.

Nation-state actors are shifting their targets

Nation-states have shifted their targets to align with the evolving political goals in the countries where they originate.

Microsoft observed 16 different nation-state actors either targeting customers involved in the global COVID-19 response efforts or using the crisis in themed lures to expand their credential theft and malware delivery tactics. These COVID-themed attacks targeted prominent governmental health care organizations in efforts to perform reconnaissance on their networks or people. Academic and commercial organizations involved in vaccine research were also targeted.

In recent years there has been an important focus on vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure. While we must remain vigilant and continue to increase security for critical infrastructure, and while these targets will continue to be attractive to nation-state actors, in the past year such actors have largely focused on other types of organizations. In fact, 90% of our nation-state notifications in the past year have been to organizations that do not operate critical infrastructure. Common targets have included nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), advocacy groups, human rights organizations and think tanks focused on public policy, international affairs or security. This trend may suggest nation-state actors have been targeting those involved in public policy and geopolitics, especially those who might help shape official government policies. Most of the nation-state activity we observed the past year originated from groups in Russia, Iran, China and North Korea.

Each nation-state actor we track has its own preferred techniques and the report details the preferred ones for some of the most active groups.

Ransomware continues to grow as a major threat

The Department of Homeland Security, FBI and others have warned us all about ransomware, especially its potential use to disrupt the 2020 elections. What we’ve seen supports the concerns they’ve raised.

Encrypted and lost files and threatening ransom notes have now become the top-of-mind fear for most executive teams. Attack patterns demonstrate that cybercriminals know when there will be change freezes, such as holidays, that will impact an organization’s ability to make changes (such as patching) to harden their networks. They’re aware of when there are business needs that will make organizations more willing to pay ransoms than incur downtime, such as during billing cycles in the health, finance and legal industries.

Attackers have exploited the COVID-19 crisis to reduce their dwell time within a victim’s system – compromising, exfiltrating data and, in some cases, ransoming quickly – apparently believing that there would be an increased willingness to pay as a result of the outbreak. In some instances, cybercriminals went from initial entry to ransoming the entire network in under 45 minutes.

At the same time, we also see that human-operated ransomware gangs are performing massive, wide-ranging sweeps of the internet, searching for vulnerable entry points, as they “bank” access – waiting for a time that is advantageous to their purpose.

Working from home presents new challenges

We all know that COVID-19 has accelerated the work-from-home trend that was already well underway in 2019.

Traditional security policies within an organization’s perimeter have become much harder to enforce across a wider network made up of home and other private networks and unmanaged assets in the connectivity path. As organizations continue to move applications to the cloud, we’re seeing cybercriminals increase distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to disrupt user access and even obfuscate more malicious and harmful infiltrations of an organization’s resources.

It’s also important to address the human element as fundamental to a secure workforce by looking at challenges such as insider threats and social engineering by malicious actors. In a recent survey conducted by Microsoft, 73% of CISOs indicated that their organization encountered leaks of sensitive data and data spillage in the last 12 months, and that they plan to spend more on insider risk technology owing to the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the first half of 2020, we saw an increase in identity-based attacks using brute force on enterprise accounts. This attack technique uses systematic guessing, lists of passwords, dumped credentials from previous breaches or other similar methods to forcibly authenticate to a device or service. Given the frequency of passwords being guessed, phished, stolen with malware or reused, it’s critical for people to pair passwords with some second form of strong credential. For organizations, enabling MFA is an essential call to action.

A community approach to cybersecurity is critical

At Microsoft, we use a combination of technology, operations, legal action and policy to disrupt and deter malicious activity.

As a technical measure, for example, we are investing in sophisticated campaign clustering intelligence in Microsoft 365 to enable security operations center (SOC) teams to piece together these increasingly complex campaigns from their fragments. We also try to make it more difficult for criminals to operate by disrupting their activities through legal action. By taking proactive action to seize their malicious infrastructure, the bad actors lose visibility, capability and access across a range of assets previously under their control, forcing them to rebuild. Since 2010, our Digital Crimes Unit has collaborated with law enforcement and other partners on 22 malware disruptions, resulting in over 500 million devices rescued from cybercriminals.

Even with all of the resources we dedicate to cybersecurity, our contribution will only be a small piece of what’s needed to address the challenge. It requires policymakers, the business community, government agencies and, ultimately, individuals to make a real difference, and we can only have significant impact through shared information and partnerships. This is one of the reasons we initially launched Microsoft’s Security Intelligence Report in 2005, and it’s one of the reasons we’ve evolved that report into this new Digital Defense Report. We hope this contribution will help us all work together better to improve the security of the digital ecosystem.

Tags: AI, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, Digital Defense Report, email security, IoT, machine learning, network security, phishing, ransomware, security intelligence, security strategies