Open for Business
updated on 05 February 2008
A new blueprint
Within days of becoming Bar Council chairman in 2007, Geoffrey Vos QC spoke out against the exclusivity of his profession. After having been involved in diversity projects for many years, Vos knew exactly what he was talking about. Just three months previously, he had asked Lord Neuberger to lead a working party to tackle concerns that the Bar was not representative of society. The problem, he said, is that intelligent people from lower social backgrounds are overlooked. "If you have 10 applicants who all come from a snobby background," Vos commented, "then of course you are going to take a new barrister from a snobby background. The key is finding ways of expanding that available pool."
Neuberger rejected the methods of previous reports into the subject and recruited people from all sections of society to participate: not just judges and solicitors but academics, a corporate consultant, mature students and parents. Such a wide variety of opinions proved difficult to collate, Vos remembers. "But in the end," he says, "we managed to reach a consensus - an achievement attributable to Neuberger. He brought together all those different points of view in a series of 57 recommendations." Neuberger delivered his report in November 2007 (see "Report recommends opening up the Bar"). It made some controversial recommendations, applicable not just to the Bar, which included the introduction of a law module at secondary school and encouraging lawyers to deliver talks in schools and universities. "It has been staggeringly successful," Vos observes proudly.
Debo Nwauzu, founder of the Black Lawyers' Directory (BLD) and vociferous member of the diversity movement, welcomes the report but more cautiously than Vos. "We have had many reports and sometimes they gather dust and sometimes they don't," she says. "On its own, it is just a report. It depends on how the Bar Council acts on it." Since Tim Dutton QC succeeded Vos as the council's chairman, he has created an implementation committee and appointed leading commercial barrister Duncan Matthews as its head. Vos is confident that Matthews "intends to make sure that the report doesn't sit on the shelf", and after meeting Dutton, Nwauzu agrees. "He's not somebody that would just say something," she affirms. "But of course it's not just dependent upon one person - that's the issue. That’s the challenge."
Delivering diversity
Fortunately, many people are involved in achieving diversity in the legal profession. Nwauzu has persuaded numerous leading law firms such as DLA Piper, Lovells, Clifford Chance, Allen & Overy, and Slaughter and May to join her cause. Some of these friends have enabled BLD to develop the Legal Launch Pad programme, which took off on 31 January 2008 with an induction at DLA Piper's London office. The scheme will deliver workshops to undergraduate students from ethnic minorities and, crucially, a week's work experience at DLA Piper, Lovells, Olswang, Shoosmiths or Barclays to encourage students into the profession.
Meanwhile, Vos has just taken charge of the Social Mobility Foundation, the charity which provides opportunities for bright young people from less privileged backgrounds to enter major professions. Vos has overseen the foundation's growth since its establishment three years ago. Last summer, he wrote to all the barristers' chambers in the country calling for volunteers willing to receive a summer intern. "We had a huge response," he recalls. "A whole raft of young members of the profession were lining up to participate." Vos organised legal placements for 26 students last summer. This year, he is hoping to double that figure, and develop a mentoring programme in tandem. "We have introduced a way to mentor young people to get them into the profession, to bring them forward from their schools, advise them about which universities they should go to, and get them contacts within the profession. We've had a huge response from mentors."
The increasing number of lawyers eager to become involved indicates the profession's growing understanding that Vos and Nwauzu are not persuading firms and chambers to set quotas (which is against the law); they are raising aspirations among all young people. "We don't all have to be Baroness Scotland or Mrs Justice Dobbs," Nwauzu laughs. "But we encourage them to learn that the sky's the limit. So that if this is what they want to do, then they can do it." Vos states that SMF placements and the like "can become a systemic part of the professional recruitment. Our idea is to make it an established part of sixth-form life".
Turning the tables
Sixth-form students already pore over university league tables, and now the prospective lawyers among them - and their undergraduate peers - have another league table to scrutinise. The Black Solicitors' Network (BSN) launched the first diversity league table in 2006 to evaluate the ethnic and gender composition of major law firms. In 2007 63 of the top 100 firms took part in the survey.
Michael Webster, chairman of the BSN, says that the league table "is just a starting point… inspired by the absence of data on the central ingredient that shapes a law firm and its ideals - namely its staff". The firm that came top of the 2007 rankings was East Midlands practice Flint Bishop & Barnett. When Law Society President Andrew Holroyd dropped by the firm's head office in Derby, he said, "It is good to visit such a successful law firm where diversity is so high on the agenda. Flint Bishop shows a real commitment to recruiting and developing people based solely on ability regardless of race, cultural background or gender."
To reach the top of the table, Flint Bishop zoomed past City firms that have thrown money and manpower at developing watertight diversity practice. But a survey commissioned by The Lawyer last year found that 38% of lawyers disagreed with clients monitoring diversity practice. Webster thinks that firms without diversity data risk being marginalised by clients and future lawyers. But, rather than firms assessing what they have now, Vos and Nwauzu's campaign wills them to focus on the future. As Vos says, encouraging a diverse force of young people into law and placing bright talent before practitioners, "secures the future of the profession".
Daring to dream
The system needs more time before that hope becomes practised behaviour. Vos observes that discrimination still occurs during recruitment, especially at the Bar. "In the past," he notes, "the selection process has taken the form of interviews with people who are not trained in non-discriminatory interview processes. We need to be able to find ways which don't lead to selection in our own image." One way of tackling the problem is setting clear guidelines within which to recruit and train. In addition to participating in programmes facilitated by bodies like the BLD and the SMF, 71% of firms now have a diversity policy.
In 1992 Weil Gotshal & Manges became one of the first law firms in New York - probably the world - to institute a diversity policy. Today, the firm prides itself on having fully trained staff on diversity issues and "affinity groups", such as Asian Attorneys@Weil and Latinos@Weil, to foster a better understanding within the firm of the unique issues facing members of such groups. As well as heading up the London office's corporate tax department, Sarah Priestley also oversees Women@Weil in the United Kingdom and Europe. "We use the group to look at internal issues for women who work at the firm," she explains. "For example, when we first started the group, there wasn't a clear maternity policy for our colleagues in Warsaw." The initiative also helps the firm maintain strong links with female clients. "Female clients have said that they don't want to be taken to 'another cricket match'," Priestley explains. "So we've done chocolate tasting and flower arranging and we've had excellent feedback. It's part of the firm's ethos for everybody to respect everyone and treat each other properly." This inclusive philosophy is unmistakably grounded in the firm's US roots. The notion of the American Dream, after all, is entirely inclusive and equitable.
Despite coming from a more traditionally class-based society, UK firms are definitely striving to recruit from a more diverse pool of talent. Claire Kinselley, graduate recruiter at top City firm Herbert Smith, says, "We're very keen to reach out to people who perhaps wouldn't normally think of applying for graduate programmes. We do a lot of skills and support sessions with careers services to encourage people to think seriously about a career in law." Kinselley's policy sounds gratifyingly aligned with Nwauzu's focus on raising aspirations among potential lawyers rather than changing commercially damaging behaviour in qualified ones. Notably, Herbert Smith won LawCareers.Net's special commendation for diversity award in 2007.
All you need is imagination
Many law firms - and, believe it or not, some barristers' chambers - are writing diversity policies, releasing staff data and altering recruitment tactics. But they are just one side of the issue. The real challenge is raising the aspirations of intelligent young people that happen to have been born on the shore of the traditional pool of talent. Once the pool is widened, logic dictates that the diversity of the profession will increase exponentially.
Nwauzu says, "We are all important. When people think about diversity, they think it's about one section of society or another. But really it's about all of us, every single one of us." It may sound like rhetoric, but Nwauzu's attitude smacks of common sense. The diversity movement does not focus on unpicking historical discrimination, nor does it concentrate on just one group in society. The diversity movement has a much larger purpose: to ensure that any schoolchild can imagine qualifying as a lawyer. It could be you.
