Equal before the law

When it comes to diversity in the legal profession, whether it be diversity of class, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, people often ask me why it is something I feel so strongly about. Is it based on business strategy? Is it a sense of corporate responsibility, or is it just born out of basic decency and moral obligation? The answer to all those is of course a resounding yes, but for me the fundamental point is simply this: our legal system is built on the premise that every person is equal before the law. How is it possible for us to adhere to that premise if our profession is not reflective of that equality, and if it is not representative of the population we work with and for?

We must do better. It is common sense. It is morally right. It is good for business, and the evidence is overwhelming. There are beacons of excellence within our profession, and at Hogan Lovells we are working very hard to address this issue, but there is much work still to be done by us all.

Moreover, the challenge isn't just about increasing percentages. We also need to work hard on the wider societal perception that diversity matters. It saddens me that this debate is still so relatively new, and it is frustrating that we still have some of the outdated notions reinforced to us by the media. For example, the message that our female senior partners are some kind of super-heroes for having managed to reach their positions. They should be the rule, not something remarkable! Until we have normalised this sort of assumption we still have work to do.

The scale of the issue

While conscious discrimination is thankfully rare in our profession, the recent findings by legal communications agency Byfield Consultancy in their report 'Opening up or shutting out? Social mobility in the legal profession' highlights the sheer scale of the challenge we face. To summarise just some of the points outlined in the report, at trainee stage 54 per cent of those surveyed were female but this dropped to just 24 per cent by partner level. Across the board only 19 per cent of trainees graduated from a university outside of the Russell Group and only 10 per cent of trainees are black or from an ethnic minority, dropping to an embarrassing 4 per cent at partner level. This is simply not good enough.

Nobody who is serious about diversity thinks that the issues faced by the legal profession can be resolved overnight. But the fact remains that we need to work harder to level the playing field and overcome the sense so many have that they cannot achieve success because of their gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or background. There is no reason those people can't succeed if they are only given the opportunity to do so. But we must focus on creating those opportunities and facilitate that success.

Lady Justice Hallett puts it well when she says 'unconscious bias means that those involved in the selection process do not always appreciate the extent to which the playing field has been uneven.'

The key to this is early intervention - not at the recruitment of trainees stage but well before, then continuously as part of career progression. It applies to the selection of the schools and universities from which we think our future lawyers will come, to the selection of colleagues to work on our cases, and in the selection of individuals for promotion to higher office.

At Hogan Lovells, we already actively participate in, and indeed have pioneered, a number of initiatives that are trying to make headway into all aspects of diversity and we work hard to encourage others to do the same. For me it boils down to the simple premise of giving less advantaged people the advantages that others may take for granted.

The task in hand

On behalf of both myself and Hogan Lovells, I feel very privileged to be working at the forefront of this challenge, and will be honoured to assume the role of chair for PRIME when the current chair David Morley steps down in May. Hogan Lovells was one of 23 founding law firms of PRIME, which launched in the UK in September 2011. The programme aims to provide fair access to work experience in the legal sector to young people from less privileged backgrounds who might otherwise not have the opportunity to access careers in the legal world.

Through collaboration across the legal profession, PRIME has instigated real change in the legal sector's approach to opening up access to this world. We have made strong progress in the past four years, exceeding our target and increasing membership from 22 to 89 firms. David was a driving force behind PRIME and he has done a great job as its chair. I intend to continue his legacy and look to encourage many more firms to join us in this mission.

Our efforts

Although focusing on social mobility here at Hogan Lovells, we are proud of our efforts in all diversity issues and continue to be recognised by a range of diversity bodies. Just some of our recent achievements include winning the British Legal Awards 2015 'Diversity Initiative of the Year' category for our Global Diversity Plan, the 'Engaging Women' category at the 2015 Business in the Community Opportunity Now Excellence in Practice Awards, and the Euromoney European Women in Business Law Awards 'Best International Firm for Work-life Balance' for the second time in 2015. We were ranked in The Times' Top 50 Employers for Women 2015 for the fourth time this year, have received a top rating of 100 per cent on the Human Rights Campaign's annual 'Best Places to Work Corporate Equality Index Report' for seven consecutive years, were ranked in the Stonewall Top 100 Employers 2015 Workplace Equality Index for the fifth consecutive year, and were recently recognised for having one of the Top 10 Ethnicity Employee Networks worldwide by The Economist Global Diversity List, also receiving The Black Solicitors Network 2015 Recruitment Award.

With regard to social mobility, our relationship with PRIME is just one element of a much wider programme. Early intervention was a key driver for instance in the development of our Ladder to Law programme, which we launched in 2010.

The Ladder to Law initiative is designed to widen access to the legal profession by giving young people the information they need to encourage them towards a career in law. We want to employ the best graduates, but the first step towards this is getting young people into the universities and ensuring they are well informed about what a career in law entails.

We reach out to Year 9-12 students aged between 13 and 18 from diverse backgrounds at schools where a high percentage of the pupils are eligible for free school meals, and are likely to be the first in their immediate family to go to university. This year, we have done so in collaboration with RARE Recruitment.

Other initiatives of which we are very proud are the Pathways to Law and Pathways Plus programmes. Their aim is to provide opportunities for students from state schools in England who are interested in a career in law and will be first generation attendees at university - as I was. The Pathways to Law programme currently runs at seven universities and since 2008 we have provided work experience to 84 Year 12 students.

Pathways Plus is an additional partnership which we have run since 2013. Its aim is to provide opportunities for first year law students from state schools in England and who are the first generation attendees at university. As a sponsor we assist with the interview and selection process and have hosted more than 120 students for residential training and 40 students for work experience since 2014.

Further initiatives include our programme with the excellent Aspiring Solicitors, which aims to provide increased access, opportunity, and assistance to aspiring solicitors from underrepresented groups. Since 2011 we have also taken part in the social mobility Business Compact initiative, 'Opening Doors, Breaking Barriers'. The Compact asks businesses to commit to supporting communities and local schools, improving skills and creating jobs by providing opportunities for all young people to get a foot on the ladder by recruiting openly and fairly. We recognise, in doing all of this, that not every student will join Hogan Lovells in due course. Some may decide that the law is not for them. Others will wish to be criminal lawyers and some will join our competitors. If they do, we will have succeeded. We will have made a difference to people's lives by exposing them to a possibility beyond their current horizons.

Challenges

Although there is some excellent progress being made with regard to the issues of gender, sexual orientation, and ethnic diversity, social mobility is arguably a much more complex issue. According to the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission only 7 per cent of UK schoolchildren attend independent schools, yet they make up 40 per cent of graduates from Oxbridge.

Within the legal profession this issue seems to be particularly apparent at the university level, where the pool of universities firms recruit from is predominantly limited to the Russell Group. According to the Chambers Student Survey from 2010-2012 almost 80 per cent of law trainees graduated from one of these 24 institutions.

This is further compounded by the legal industry's system of training contracts where the statistics suggest that, unless you go to one of those top universities, you probably won't get a training contract and so you will be prevented from qualifying as a lawyer.

But what is the solution? Law firms like Hogan Lovells want to hire the best and the obvious route to do this is to recruit from the top institutions. While that may be logical, the risk is that we overlook the potential in those candidates whose grades may not reflect their true talent or who may actually have achieved far more in real terms when set against the context of their background (including very often the absence of any parental support) or access to opportunities.

It isn't just about the university attended and the grades achieved, either. Historically, law firms have tended to look more favourably on those with 'life experience' perhaps gained while travelling or undertaking work placements. The issue here is that such extra curricular activities are not available to everyone and even such things as work placements are less likely to be secured by people with less family connections in those industries.

What's more, this system assumes that we value this type of experience over students who, for instance, may have achieved excellent grades at an underperforming school or university and who may have had to work to support themselves - sometimes being a carer, or having two jobs to help fund their studies, or even facing active cultural resistance to their chosen career path. Characteristics highlighted by these experiences, such as determination, dedication, real work experience, and the associated skills gained through these activities are surely invaluable in the workplace.

However, and this is critical, this isn't about lowering standards. Our recruitment process is rigorous and the worst thing we could do is select unsuitable people and thereby set them up to fail. Rather it is about not getting hung up on exam grades and trying to unearth those individuals with talent and potential but who may not have had the same opportunities in their educational journey.

This includes increasing the number of universities we target beyond the Russell Group and introducing a bursary scheme through which we will give more than £150,000 worth of funding to undergraduate law students over the next three to five years.

Contextual recruitment

One way in which we have tried to overcome this is to pioneer a ground-breaking new system of contextual recruitment. The tool, provided by specialist graduate diversity recruitment company RARE, works by hardwiring social mobility metrics into our existing graduate recruitment system, enabling us to take the economic background and personal circumstances of a candidate into account for the first time.

This will allow us to assess a candidate's academic performance against the overall performance of their school, providing the context as to how that set of grades was achieved; something which conventional assessment systems are currently unable to do. By contextualising the performance of individual applicants, we will be able to identify those 'stand-out' candidates regardless of their background.

For instance, someone who gets AAA at A Level from a very high performing school may be underperforming relative to the average attainment at that institution, whereas someone who gets AAA at A Level from a school where the average is DDE, whose parents may not have attended university, and who lives in a deprived postcode, is outstanding - even if they do not have glistening work experience and extra-curricular activities.

The system works in a similar way to an equal opportunities questionnaire - in that the answers are confidential and are unseen by those screening, but where certain answers raise flags. Any individual who meets two or more of these criteria will be identified during the selection process. We have found that this system works particularly well alongside situational judgement testing - another useful tool to help identify potential, which may otherwise go unnoticed.

The next step

Unlike gender equality, on which there has been so much focus in recent years, when it comes to social mobility (which inevitably encompasses ethnicity in its outreach), we are at an even earlier starting point, and it is going to take a significant cultural shift to change attitudes. In today's political climate the issue of background, and in particular wealth, is a hot topic and one which many from disadvantaged backgrounds are less comfortable talking about.

In addition to the overriding challenge of addressing the bigger picture, there are also a number of other challenges we have experienced. Externally, the largest of these challenges has been engaging schools and parents. A combination of the resources needed to reach the numbers required to make an impact, coupled with the amount of time teachers and parents have, has proven difficult. It is also depressing to think that we are often fighting the system - persuading students that their teachers are wrong when they tell them that they will not 'fit' at a firm like Hogan Lovells. To combat these various challenges we now outsource the majority of this outreach work to specialist third parties. This allows us to focus our energy on the recruitment end of the programme while not losing momentum with early intervention.

From an internal perspective, we have worked extensively on our own in-house training to ensure that all staff involved in the screening, selection and recruiting process (and all of our partners) have undergone our unconscious bias training, and are well versed in the social mobility programmes. It is far too easy (and perfectly natural) to recruit people in your own image or that of your current team, but what we try to instill is an open-mindedness and a conscious effort to see the bigger picture. Until the gene pool is truly diverse, hiring in one's own image is not a sustainable model.

With that in mind, I am very pleased with the impact our diversity initiatives have had to date on the overall Hogan Lovells culture. The accolades and awards we have won over the last few years go just some way to demonstrating this. However, when it comes to social mobility, it is still too early in the process to be able to formally measure achievement or to assess the inroads we have made. Given the age at which we are engaging young people, it takes at least five to seven years from initial contact to impact our workforce once law school is taken into account.

The next phase for us is, therefore, to maintain a close eye on all our social mobility programmes, and to develop a robust measurement framework as soon as possible to ensure that we can track our progress formally.

Although all the initiatives we are running are helping us to do this, the fact remains that we are sadly not yet at a stage where this is normalised. It should be standard practice. However, until this is the case, we will continue to strive for equality, diversity, and to promote social mobility in any way we can. I invite you to join us in that endeavour.

Nicholas Cheffings is a partner at Hogan Lovells (www.hoganlovells.com)

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