Why social mobility is hard wired into the legal profession

Former government minister Alan Milburn has been in the news this week publicising an update to his 2009 report on social mobility in the professions. As I make my rounds of City solicitors' firms, I am heartened by the extent of the buy in to the principle of levelling the playing field in legal recruitment. It comes from many of the partners and graduate recruitment professionals I meet, a notable number of whom have personal experience of breaking into and then rising to the top of an industry that is now deemed to be somewhat less elitist, certainly when compared to politics, medicine and journalism. Many of the partners I encounter come from truly ordinary beginnings - some grew up on council estates; others were the sons or daughters of blue-collar workers or came from sole-parent households; and very many went to regular state schools. For some, the only advantage they had (beyond natural talent and ambition) was entering the profession at a time of increasing demand for trainees. These people - some now in management or other influential positions - really do get the concept of social mobility. Just the other day, Allen & Overy's senior partner David Morley mentioned on R4's Today programme that over 70 firms had now signed up to the PRIME work experience initiative, and there are several other schemes designed to promote wider access to legal careers.

Is the playing field flat yet? No, it is not, but in my view this is less about senior lawyers' attitudes and more about differences in the quality and nature of schooling. The cost of post-graduate legal education is also an important factor in parts of the profession, though not quite so much in the City, where most traineeships come with law school sponsorship. The remaining bumps in the ground will be hard to roll flat while a good private education still confers undeniable advantages in terms of teaching quality, grade achievement and the grooming of confident and socially tooled-up young men and women.

The legal profession has its hands tied to an extent. If we're talking about trainee solicitors, it can and should only recruit extremely talented individuals. Recognising talent and potential would be so much easier if all who present themselves for consideration had been given the same chances in life. Plainly, this is not the case. So should the legal profession get into the business of social engineering and factor in the differences in how well students have been prepared in school and in life? On Thursday, The Telegraph website ran a poll asking "Is it right for employers to favour young people who went to state schools?" Only 10% answered: 'Yes, state school pupils have far fewer advantages', while 90% said: 'No, students shouldn't be penalised for having a good education'. Many of those who voted would have been thinking about their own children, and perhaps despairing at the idea that all those tens of thousands of pounds of hard-earned school fees could become a millstone around their necks. I get that. But I also believe that within the profession we have enough individuals who want the brightest and most ambitious state-educated young people today to have the chances that they themselves had decades ago.

One of Alan Milburn's key complaints is the various professions' focus on recruiting from just 19 UK universities. At some of the very biggest law firms you will find a small number of recruits from a broader spread of universities, but overwhelmingly the Russell Group dominates, especially in the top 200 or so firms offering most training contracts. If Oxbridge/Russell Group admissions were such that every bright, academic kid in the UK had an equal chance of winning a place then I wouldn't be so concerned about the dominance of these universities in law firm recruitment. But let's face it: there is a whole bunch of unfairness within a system that will almost certainly never ever be a level playing field. The profession will have to arrive at its own best practice and not wait for the state education system to perform some Lazarus-like act.

As a first step, the legal profession needs to know who it is, and actually measure how it is doing in relation to social mobility. We might have taken a step back this week, following the Legal Services Board's announcement that this type of mandatory data collection and publication will be delayed until 2013. I suppose the important thing is that it is on its way. In relation to my own projects - notably CityLawLIVE - I have already started collecting this type of data using the questions and categories recommended last year by the Legal Services Board. If you're applying for training contracts in the next few weeks or even vacation schemes for next year, you may well start seeing questions asking about the type of school you attended or whether your parents attended university. These questions are not asked in order to rule you in or out of an opportunity, they are designed to help the profession measure and understand itself. Do fill them in accurately because some good may eventually come out of your tiny contribution to the cause.