Cynthia FortlageCEO, The FORTLAGE Collective · I help senior leadership teams turn difference, disagreement and complexity into stronger leadership & measurable business performance | Founder, 4P Leadership Accelerator | Author & Board Advisor

The Real Financial Risk of Ignoring DEI #substack #shorts

11 Aug 2025 · 1 min

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1:10

This content was created by Cynthia Fortlage. This content was uploaded by Cynthia Fortlage. This is a YouTube short titled "The Real Financial Risk of Ignoring DEI #substack #shorts" (created 2025-08-11). The excerpt is a brief spoken discussion between two speakers (labelled SPEAKER A and SPEAKER B) about the financial and legal risks of ignoring DEI in the UK: average employment-discrimination tribunal payouts (~£27,607), typical legal fees (~£10,000), an estimated claim rate of 1 in 1,000, and the need for senior leaders and boards to treat discrimination risk as a core business risk.

Right now today, based upon all the cases for employment discrimination in the UK that have gone to tribunal, have an average payout of about £27,607. That does not include the legal fees which are almost £10,000 on their own.
Yeah.
The rate of getting a claim against you is 1 in 1,000. So, if you're a 1,000-person organization, you you're probably going to get one. If you're a 100-person company, you have a 10% chance of getting one of those claims against you. And if you're, you know, depending upon the size of your organization, when I deal with 4,000 or 5,000, 10,000-person companies, you're almost getting to a very significant number of managing risk. Even the most senior leaders, the board, the CEO, the CFO, they have a corporate responsibility to manage risk. Risk. Yeah, that's a business conversation, and we're not having it.