Are law firms doing enough to encourage diversity?

It has been difficult for students from socio-economically deprived backgrounds to make it in the legal profession, but law firms are waking up to the importance of diversity.

Statistics for the proportion of lawyers who attended state schools or are the first in their family to go to university are few and far between, with most firms not harvesting such data.

But where this information is available, the figures aren’t pretty, with around 40%-50% of lawyers at some City law firms having been privately educated. By contrast, just 7% of the general population have attended private schools.

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This is just one part of the diversity strategy implemented by Norton Rose Fulbright, which also works with schemes such as The Sutton Trust’s Pathways to Law project and, like Mayer Brown, legal work experience initiative Prime, to help school students from working class backgrounds to access the traditional universities that supply the majority of their graduate intake.

Hogan Lovells runs a similar multi-pronged approach – raising the number of universities that it targets to 28 this year and, as a Pathways to Law founder member, encouraging school age students thinking about a career in law by providing workshops and work experience as well as mentors.

“We are open minded about where people come from, as long as they are bright, motivated and capable of doing the complex work that we do,” says Clare Harris, associate director of legal resourcing at Hogan Lovells.

She says the firm is looking to extend its mentoring work with London-based school students to schools in the regions through its connections with particular universities and work with The Sutton Trust and Prime.

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