Accessing all areas

Simmons & Simmons has sought to improve the diversity of its talent pool, but recognises more needs to be done. Recent activities include recruitment campaigns targeting more mature candidates.

By David Dickinson, senior partner, Simmons & Simmons

Discussing and encouraging diversity is a current issue, and many organisations have been keen to show their diversity credentials. The diversity expectations on all businesses (not just law firms) have, of course, grown. Traditionally diversity was seen as a gender issue. Now it is much broader, including race, religion, sexual orientation, age and disability, among others. However, our own experience of the gender issue does not lead me to conclude that my own firm has yet learned how it can stimulate true diversity.

We should not confuse diversity with multiculturalism, however. As an international firm with 50 per cent of our people outside the UK, Simmons & Simmons embraces a very broad range of cultures throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia. This doesn’t automatically mean we are a fully-diverse employer.

Perhaps I should start by saying why I consider diversity is important to this firm and, indeed, why it should matter to any law firm. It is about recruiting, mentoring, developing and promoting the best talent to build the firm’s future. Given the battle all firms face for talent, and the huge resources put into recruiting talented people, we should all seek to access talent from as large a pool as we can manage. This is about getting the best people – those who can contribute to their firms – and helping those firms achieve the desired success. Diversity has nothing to do with quotas. Nor does it imply we anticipate any reduction in our quality standards. However, as an employer we must take the trouble to make it clear we are open to all, and help talented people develop the broader skills set our profession requires.

By looking at the efforts, challenges and levels of success we’ve had improving the firm’s diversity across some of these areas, I hope it will provide some useful insight.

Gender

For many years my own firm, together with many others, has recruited at least as many female as male trainees. This hasn’t been a conscious act, but a reflection of the number of high-quality female law students emerging from our major universities. However the proportion of female partners has not moved in tandem. This highlights a key challenge faced by most City law firms – how to overcome the far higher rate of attrition for female associates than male associates, which so drains the female senior-associate talent pool.

So what actions have we taken to try and encourage female lawyers to remain with us?

The firm recently began a pilot called Working Time Preferencing, aimed at improving the work/life balance of lawyers. Although work/life balance is an issue that spans both genders, it is particularly felt by senior female associates, who may either have young children or be contemplating motherhood, and who therefore have a particularly strong desire for a decent balance between home commitments and those at work. Working Time Preferencing allows associates, typically at the four-year qualified level and above, to outline their preferred working parameters at the beginning of each year. If so desired, and subject to their practice area still being able to meet the needs of clients, associates are then able to define their working hours. They might choose to work strict nine-to-five office hours, to work solely during term time, or take a month off between deals. This initiative, which is open to all qualifying fee-earners and not solely female associates, is still in its pilot stage, and the level of its success is yet to be determined, but initial feedback has been very positive.

However, female associates close to partnership – particularly those that have had time away from the office for maternity leave – may find themselves in competition with others at a time that is sometimes disadvantageous to them. Compared to their peers, maternity leave has lessened the time it takes to build up the client relationships required of a partner. Most firms have sought to resolve this by extending the ‘partnership window’, but if the attrition rate of, particularly female, senior associates is to be reduced, firms need to ensure this difficult issue is managed sensitively. They must recognise the understandable pressures all senior associates face in being perceived as not achieving partnership goals at the same time as their peers.

At Simmons & Simmons we have a diversity forum, which has recently been considering a range of initiatives to aid female retention. The forum plays an important role for the firm, acting as both a sounding board and also as a generator of ideas to improve the firm’s diversity.

In general, while law firms have adapted themselves to the concept of flexibility and are better adjusted to understanding the family circumstances of their members, how we achieve a better equilibrium in terms of the ratio of female to male partners still remains largely unsolved. Hopefully with time, our own initiatives will have a positive impact in increasing retention – not just of our female associates, but of male associates as well.

Race and religion

Like most other firms, in recent years we have also sought to improve our diversity in terms of the firm’s employees from different races and religions and appointed significant numbers of trainees from ethnic minorities. However, the number of partners who have been appointed from these recruitments has not led to a significant shift in our profile. The 2006 diversity review by the Black Solicitors Network showed that we are not alone; the average law firm had, in percentage terms, three times as many trainees from ethnic minorities as it did partners.

As a firm we have subscribed to the view we should embrace diversity – and winning the Solicitors’ Race Equality Award 2005 from The Law Society and the Commission for Racial Equality shows some success. Despite seeking to address diversity of race and religion through recruitment, ensuring those recruits stay with the firm through to partnership remains a challenge. This is sad – not only because we have failed in our objective, but also because we have not achieved the balance we hoped would result. It is an area the firm is looking into further to improve its understanding.

Taking action

City firms are frequently berated for their lack of diversity. While it may be a fact, I question whether the criticism is justified. Statistically I am sure the figures speak for themselves, but I do not believe this is the result of a glass ceiling being imposed by firms. We have moved away from the days when partnerships were so cohesive they excluded those who did not fit an exact mould. Just like the gender battles of old, the battle for wider diversity is long won. The domination of the upper end of the legal profession by white males is not necessarily surprising, given the history, although it may be disappointing. The real issue is how we see this changing.

It has to be evident that recruitment policies of themselves, however well constructed, will not change the position. By way of example I have been recruiting lawyers into various positions on a continuous basis for most of the last 20 years. During that time I have interviewed only one African and one Afro-Caribbean candidate.

A possible explanation for this is that most City firms seek to recruit their talent from a limited number of leading universities. If we limit our intake to people from this pool we are, of course, imposing a limitation to look only at those people who have applied to these institutions. The arguments against extending our source of talent lies in our confidence that the university selection process gives some form of warranty as to the excellence of their product and, frankly, with limited resource, trawling the broader range of universities for talent would be an expensive and time-consuming business. So the first point should be to encourage a more diverse group to see there future in the law during the course of their secondary education. We must help instil a desire among a more diverse group of applicants to apply to these universities, read law and take up a training contract. As a single firm it will be difficult to achieve this. A new initiative led by The Sutton Trust, in co-operation with The College of Law, is looking, with the support of law firms, to identify, mentor and encourage students from more diverse backgrounds to make a career in law. Hopefully, this will go some way to addressing the issue, and our firm will support the initiative, which requires assistance, particularly in work experience and mentoring

The second route is to be open to recruiting from other sources. Not having a university degree myself, I am not of the view that the only place from which talent can be sourced is a few universities, but this requires us to be open to supporting and promoting people who come to us from other backgrounds. The most obvious route is through offering training contracts to talented paralegals and by looking at lateral recruits with less standardised educational and career backgrounds.

The Black Solicitors Network is actively engaged in helping black solicitors join City firms. We are working with them to support their activities. In addition (apart from our recruitment activities in South Africa) we are keen to set up a programme to provide opportunities for students from West Africa to spend time, and hopefully a career, with us. In time we hope that this will provide role models to others who wish to enter the legal profession.

Recruitment is only the beginning of the process, however, and taking people through to partnership will take considerable time and application. Continuous mentoring has to be part of this process.

Being diverse also requires looking at the ‘blurred edges’ of the firm’s culture to ensure it is inclusive to different races and religions. For example, if the firm’s traditional means of building team spirit is based around going to the local bar, or if it seeks to build client relationships through cocktail or champagne receptions, this may exclude those who will not go to a bar on religious grounds. We should all be conscious of this, and act accordingly to aid inclusivity.

Sexual orientation

I was very pleased to find that our firm is seen as a gay-friendly organisation by gay-rights advocacy group Stonewall, which said we were “setting the standard” for other law firms. It would be hard to identify any particular action that has been taken to earn this recognition. When we were asked by the Department of Constitutional Affairs (DCA) to publish our diversity statistics, we decided to cover not just gender and race, but also sexual orientation and religion. The publication of the data certainly helped in our being recognised for openness. More recently, we have set up an informal ‘network’ for the firm’s gay, lesbian and bisexual members, which has already helped a gay trainee to find a gay mentor within the firm. As Stonewall itself acknowledges, law firms in general are a long way behind the efforts of, for example, the investment banks, which have addressed the issue of sexual-orientation diversity for many years and consistently appear at the top of Stonewall’s ‘Workplace Equality Index’.

Age diversity

The latest addition to the discriminatory area is of course age. So far we have had only limited exposure to how this will work in reality. It appears fairly easy to discriminate, unintentionally, in this area, and therefore one must be additionally careful. As a firm we moved away from a rigid lockstep to a more level system some years ago, to create fairer profit allocation and encourage partners to play a full part in building the firm’s business. However, I believe it also means we do not have the concerns some firms may have over a diversity claim on age-discrimination grounds.

The pressures of the market tend to lead to retirements at an early age. However, the extension of life expectancy, and the limitation on the ability to provide pensions in a tax-efficient way, make it likely lawyers will need to work longer than has been the case in recent years. It will be interesting to see how things develop.

As a firm we recognise we need to take more time to discuss and plan with our partners – not just our professional activities within the firm, but also to help partners find useful and gainful employment when they choose to step down from partnership.

Alongside this, a development at my firm in recent years is the holding of specific recruitment events to target mature candidates as trainees – recognising that those who wish to make the law their second career bring skills and experience from their original careers to the firm.

Finally, I have given some thought to the single most important action my firm needs to take to broaden its diversity within the firm. I would put it very simply. We need to foster an internal atmosphere where people feel comfortable to be themselves, without imposing stereotypical requirements and behaviours on them. Our only requirement is their ability to provide the highest-quality legal service to our clients.

David Dickinson is senior partner at Simmons & Simmons. He can be contacted at david.dickinson@simmons-simmons.com