A rare opportunity

Diversity is never off the legal sector's agenda, yet the profession remains determinedly white, especially at senior levels. Graduate recruitment experts Rare aim to connect exceptional people from diverse backgrounds with top jobs at leading organisations. Rare director, Lianne Moseley-Mould, offers insight into how the profession's doing.

When I first met Ben*, a black first-year law student, I spent an hour and a half - as we do with all new Rare candidates - talking to him about his background, achievements and goals. There was plenty of background - foster care, a rough inner city comprehensive and a close relationship with his younger sister. The achievements were equally plentiful - almost exclusively As and A*s pre-university, voluntary work in a pupil referral unit and solid 2.1s and Firsts in his LLB. Of goals, however, there was precious little: "I want to try to use my law degree...somehow," he hedged.

Ben was witty and intelligent, but suffered from a distinct lack of confidence. He didn’t make eye contact with me once during our 90-minute meeting until I listed the magic and silver circle firms I thought he should consider. At that point, he eyed me shrewdly. "Places like that aren't for people like me," he told me.

It's a familiar story. Some of the country's top black students, with academic achievements made all the more impressive in context and personal histories that at times defy belief, feel excluded from the City. Whether they've taught themselves A-level history "because there was no teacher", or count losing both parents in a genocide as one of their "biggest challenges", truly exceptional black candidates all too often feel they do not belong.

This feeling is not entirely without foundation. Only 3.5% of partners in the top 150 firms are black or minority ethnic (BME) according to a 2009 Legal Services Board document. Crucially, this figure includes an over-representation of lawyers from Asian and Chinese backgrounds. According to the Solicitors' Regulation Authority, black lawyers make up only 2% of the total solicitors' population - and are concentrated in legal aid and small, high street firms. So if you're a young black candidate, the chances of being interviewed by someone who looks like you at a City law firm are slim indeed.

Regulatory bodies recognise this fact. The Legal Services Board has commissioned a series of bold research reports and bolder still duties for signatories. The Law Society's Diversity and Inclusion Charter, for example, requires signatories to submit diversity statistics for their own workforce at the end of every year. This is also now an SRA requirement. This enforced transparency - internally and externally - has garnered support for more substantive diversity initiatives in City law firms. Another commercial incentive is globalisation and the emerging markets boom: an international firm's workforce must reflect the increasing cultural diversity of its clients.

Regardless of background, law firms need to attract the best candidates to stay competitive. "If Herbert Smith Freehills wants to remain an elite law firm," graduate recruitment partner Matthew White explains, "then recruiting elite trainees is an essential element of our strategy.” But, he clarifies, "we should never make assumptions about who the best candidates might be".

So what is best practice for diversity and inclusion in law firms? The central tenet of Rare's model is that improving diversity isn't about lowering standards, but about levelling the playing field. Our candidates apply through the same process as all other applicants, and there are no quotas or special favours. We work with our legal clients - Allen & Overy, Ashurst, Clifford Chance, Freshfields, Herbert Smith Freehills, Hogan Lovells, Macfarlanes, Shearman & Sterling, Slaughter and May and Travers Smith - primarily to tackle entry-level barriers. The first weapon in our armoury, then, is education: at Rare, we provide guidance on applications, ability test workshops and mock interviews. We also run study seminars in contract and tort because an analysis of our 2010 first-year intake of law students found that 20% - all of whom had achieved AAB+ at A level - didn't achieve the modular grades that many law firms require.

In spite of this, we often encounter other, more deep-seated and societal issues. In May 2007 a Rare candidate - black, female, studying at Cambridge - interviewed for a training contract with a top City law firm and was rejected. The feedback on this candidate followed a familiar trend: she had met all the criteria with one exception. In the box marked "Analysis", the partner had written "not displaying", but had followed this up with an intriguing question: "yet (?)". This raised an important issue. Was this a skill that some of our candidates hadn't yet developed? If so, why? And, vitally, what could we do about it? The candidate's response to the feedback provided an answer. Her peers, she pointed out, had been discussing these issues around the dinner table since they were children. "At home," she said, "I don't even have a dinner table."

This episode inspired the creation of one of our most ambitious and successful programmes, which won the UK Legal Diversity Award in October 2012 for attracting talent from non-traditional backgrounds. Articles is a development programme that helps BME students to perform to their potential throughout the vacation scheme application and interview process. From there, we hope they go on to career success and to securing a training contract.

Elham Saudi, an ex-Slaughter and May lawyer, originally developed the programme to act as a "virtual dinner table". As Raph Mokades, our managing director puts it, the programme aims to "help level the playing field and give the best of our candidates some of the advantages that people with family connections to the City have."

During regular one-on-one sessions, Elham facilitates intellectually-charged discussions on topical press articles and case studies with participants to develop intellectual dexterity as well as greater rigour and resilience. Programme co-director Melissa Andrewes, who was a lawyer at Slaughter and May and Clifford Chance before becoming head of students at the College of Law, does one-on-one coaching sessions throughout the programme to keep candidates engaged. Group sessions, held at our clients' offices, see students working closely with graduate recruitment, trainees, associates and partners. The programme is challenging, but the results speak for themselves – in 2013 and 2014, 40 Articles candidates secured 50 vacation schemes between them. Moreover, of the 48 training contracts Rare candidates have been offered by Clifford Chance, almost two-thirds of them were secured by Articles participants. In the last 12 months, we’ve made 248 placements in total, across all of our partner firms.

One recent graduate of the Articles programme came to the United Kingdom as a refugee, speaking no English and having had no formal education as a child. Nonetheless, he had achieved impressive academic results. When I told him that he was eligible to apply to one of the country's most prestigious law firms, he was hesitant. "Someone like me doesn't have a chance," he told me. We enrolled him on Articles and he secured a vacation scheme with that very firm. On 1 September 2011 at 8:00am, he was called by one of the firm's well-known partners with a training contract offer. "I would have called at midnight," the partner told him, "but I thought it would be a bit inappropriate."

Another issue is a lack of positive role models for some of our candidates, an issue we have found even recent BME graduate employees find challenging in our study Five Years On. We address this in a number of ways. Firstly, our diverse team mentors our candidates. We also introduce candidates to our ever-growing network of Rare alumni, as well as our clients' partners and associates (BME and non-BME). Finally, we try to inspire our candidates: our annual celebration of the country's top 10 black students, Rare Rising Stars, showcases exceptional black people achieving extraordinary things.

We are keen to help ever more candidates reach their potential by supporting them from an earlier stage. For the past four years, we have led pre-university courses for top-performing black students to ensure that they hit the ground running when they start at some of the United Kingdom's most prestigious institutions. Last year's Unistart event saw 110 black students spend a day with the Rare team at Freshfields’ offices, taking part in workshops designed to address the challenges black students at top universities tend to encounter according to our 2010 High Achieving Black Students research report. In 2012 we launched an ambitious pilot programme to get more black kids from state schools to consider and apply for Oxbridge. 50% of our mentees secured offers. Finally, and more specifically related to law, 'Rare Foundations: Law' sees top black students working with industry specialists and visiting top law firms during their first term at university.

As for Ben, he completed the Articles programme and has now qualified with a magic circle law firm. When he got the offer, he brought a box of doughnuts to our office to say thank you (he knew how to capture the hearts and minds of the Rare team). The best thing about applying through Rare, he told us, was that the programme gave him the confidence to believe that being himself was enough, rather than needing to impersonate 'the perfect candidate'.

Lianne Moseley-Mould is a director at Rare. For more info, go to www.rarerecruitment.co.uk.

*Candidate name changed.