Welcome back to the podcast, Bride, Swindle, or Steel. I'm Alexandra Ragi. Today we're listening in on Misty

Mukerjee's presentation at the recent Trace Forum in Annapolis. Misty is the founder and managing

member of Extincio Law and an employment lawyer with three decades of

experience in workplace law, board governance, and leadership. She's presenting on DEI progress and

setbacks what compliance professionals need to know. Here's Misty. Thank you for having me.

This is no surprise to you is you open any newspaper, you will find that there are challenges to the work that's being done in the space that we call diversity, equity, and inclusion. We've added belonging to that. We've added justice to that. So we've got DEI, DE-E-I-B-B-J, Jedi, different acronyms to describe

the efforts to create a diverse pool of employees within an organization, the efforts to create

justice for those employees so that everyone has a voice and has an ability to contribute

to decision making and ideas and innovation and engagement and belonging, the intentional

thoughts around psychological safety, how we show up at work, and that we can bring our whole

selves to work in a way that enables us to optimize what we can

contribute to the organization. Those are what we call sort of DEI, that's the acronym DEI,

DEIB, DBI, and there's a lot of challenge to it following the decision of the Supreme Court

in students for fair admissions. So we won't talk too much about this case,

but it has influenced how corporations are looking at DEI work

and specifically how corporations are looking at compliance with respect to it.

So few of you raised your hand when it came to your being involved in managing compliance, even though it's in

ESG kind of area, it's typically within the purview of HR, sometimes there's a specified

DEI group or a leader, sometimes in the purview of the general counsel's office, but it's generally

not viewed as a huge compliance issue. So in June of last year, the

Supreme Court rendered its opinion, and the opinion is about 270 pages, they're small pages,

but it's a really interesting read if you're interested in understanding what is happening in our

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