Become less straight, white and male - or go out of business
Alex Spence
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article1743732.ece
Alex Spence
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article1743732.ece
In a better world, Adrian Barlow would be here to talk about his accomplishments as a lawyer. The recognition would not be undeserved: the son of a pathologist, raised in Huddersfield, Barlow read law at Cambridge before rising through the ranks of Simpson Curtis - later Pinsent Masons - to become a partner at only 31. Now, at 44, he is global head of Pinsent Masons property group, responsible for 150 fee earners and £20 million in revenues, boasting clients such as BT and Royal Mail. Instead of discussing his day job, however, we are here to talk about his sexuality.
Barlow is openly gay, a rare thing among senior partners at the UK’s top 100 law firms. He came out to his line manager as a newly qualified solicitor in the late 1990s but was warned that he would be putting his career at risk. It wasn't until 1994, on the verge of making partner and after a period in which he had become so "disconnected" in his professional life that he considered quitting to join a niche gay firm, that he told the rest of his colleagues. A fellow gay solicitor had advised him not to "ghettoise" himself, he recalls. "They said become a great lawyer where you are. Change it from within."
Ever since, Barlow has been doing that, becoming one of the profession's most eloquent champions of its need to become more diverse and inclusive. He and a determined group of gay partners and open-minded colleagues have been instrumental in making Pinsent Masons among the market leaders on diversity issues. It proudly puts its diversity initiatives at the head of its annual award and directory submissions; monitors its workforce to keep track of its progress on diversity; has enthusiastically embraced the gay lobby group Stonewall's Diversity Champions programme; and recently funded a junior solicitor's plan to start a professional network for young gay men in Leeds.
Barlow claims his sexuality has not held him back and that Pinsent Masons has been generally supportive - "The firm has never, ever imposed a glass ceiling on me," he says - but a glance at the profession at large would suggest he is an exception. Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index, which ranks the top 100 UK employers by virtue of their attitude toward gay and lesbian staff, includes numerous banks, blue chip companies and even the Royal Navy - but not a single law firm.
It is not just gays and lesbians that are victims of a "glass ceiling". A survey in Legal Business this month revealed that only 20 per cent of the 353 women promoted to partnership in 2006 were women, despite the fact that they make up more than half of those now entering the profession. In total, twenty-three per cent of partners in private practice are female, according to the Law Society, with the average in the "magic circle" dropping to around 15 per cent. The picture is even worse if you're black or Asian. According to the Diversity 2006 league tables compiled by the Black Solicitor’s Network, an average of only three per cent of partners and eight per cent of associates at the top 100 firms are from ethnic minorities. Even the most ethnically diverse firms, Fladgate Fielder and Taylor Wessing, are still 92.3 per cent white.
This is despite City firms investing thousands of pounds over the past few months to introduce the sort of diversity initiatives their clients have had in place for years: support networks; links with local schools to mentor underprivileged children who would otherwise not have access to careers in the law; recruiting through minority media; diversity training; flexible working hours, and so on.
Last year, Freshfields became the first law firm to publish an account of its corporate social responsibility initiatives, covering not only diversity but its pro bono and community activities and its impact on the environment. Recently, fellow "magic circle" firm Allen & Overy has sought to catch up. Senior partner Guy Beringer posted a series of essays to the firm’s website criticising the profession for its obsession with profits and called for City firms to create caring, welcoming workplaces or risk missing out on the best talent. The firm held its first “diversity week” in February, at which the staff cafeteria served a range of exotic world foods, Gabby Logan spoke about the loneliness of life as a female sports broadcaster and Simon Callow lectured on being a gay actor.
That same week, Herbert Smith unveiled its first support network for female employees. It was partly the work of Carolyn Lee, the first full-time diversity officer at a UK law firm, who previously held a similar position at Deutsche Bank. Under her watch, the firm has put all the partners through diversity training, bringing in “facilitators” to engage them in role-playing situations designed to challenge peceptions and prejudices - it now plans to incorporate it in all its training programmes. “Banks have been taking this seriously for about eight years,” Lee says. “The legal sector has been slower to catch up. That’s partly due to the banks being much more international – they are truly global organisations.”
It is not just public relations driving this newfound impetus – it is good business. With competition for talent between the top firms now so fierce that a newly-qualified solicitor can expect to earn up to £65,000 a year, firms realise they need to make themselves as attractive as possible to the widest pool of potential employees. The demographics of the legal profession are undergoing a seismic shift - according to the Law Society, 61.8 per cent of trainee solicitors registered in 2005-06 were women, while almost a third of the students now coming in to the profession are ethnic minorities - and if the big firms fail to show that they are open to anyone other than white, Oxbridge-educated males, they could struggle to keep up.
“It’s purely a numbers game,” says Michael Webster, a spokesman for the Black Solicitor’s Network. “If you’re restricting yourself to the 20 per cent of the pool that is white and male, you’re preventing yourself from attracting the best possible talent. You can only do that if you widen the net, and that will require law firms adopting a cultural shift.”
"It’s about time they just grew up and realised that the issue goes straight to the bottom line," Barlow says. Not only is an inclusive workplace necessary for attracting a wide pool of talented graduates, he argues, it is even more important in ensuring they stay and progress through the firm. Senior partners regard the retention of associates as their single greatest problem, according to a recent surveys in the legal press, and merely throwing more money at people has not been shown to work. As Barlow knows from personal experience, it is difficult to perform at your most productive if you feel out of place, whereas employees who feel valued are more likely to give their employer "discretionary" effort.
This seems so obvious it should hardly need pointing out, yet as Barlow says, many firms are having to be dragged “kicking and screaming” to change. Indeed, the biggest push to increase access to the City in recent months has not come from the firms themselves but from their clients. The likes of Barclays, JP Morgan and National Grid have demanded that their external legal advisers declare their diversity statistics and, in some cases, take active steps to improve them, with the implicit threat that they may be dropped if they fail to measure up.
Helen Mahy, company secretary and general counsel at National Grid and chair of the influential GC100, a grouping of the UK’s top general counsel, says that diversity will be among the key criteria for appointing law firms during National Grid's next panel review, along with "harder" criteria such as price, depth of knowledge and relevant sector experience. Advisers are unlikely to be fired solely on the basis of failing on diversity, she says, but it could be the difference in choosing between similar firms in a “beauty parade”. “If all things were equal between firms A, B and C, I think we’d go for the one that best matched our philosophy,” she says.
“They know this is a concern for us,” Mahy adds. “And at the end of the day law firms are there to service their clients.”
But satisfying clients’ demands is not the typical managing partners’ biggest headache. Indeed, the most pressing problem for the top firms is how to ensure this new, increasingly diverse crop of trainees and associates will advance to the partnership.Look down the partner profiles at any City firm and the faces are still predominantly white and male. Partnerships have traditionally been difficult to obtain and it is no secret that they are becoming more so. In the past, partners favoured their own, Webster says - “It’s human nature” – but that is no longer tenable in a globalised, multicultural corporate environment. If the next generation of female and ethnic minority lawyers don’t see that the glass ceiling has been removed, they will quickly move on. "The stark reality is that if we don't get this right we may hurt our business," says Tom Cassels, a partner at Baker & McKenzie.
That the bulk of junior lawyers are now women is a particular headache. Many want to take a break in their late 20s or early 30s to start a family, but surveys have shown that it is still regarded as "career suicide" to ask for flexible or part-time working to help them continue working. Managers are not generally sympathetic. Some decide that the relentless long hours, weekends spent in far-away airport terminals and being woken at two o'clock in the morning by clients is simply not as important as it once was. So they leave.
Again, clients could play a leading role in solving this problem. Jonathan McCoy, the UK legal director at Vodafone - who has introduced flexible working for his own employees - says firms assume an expectation on the part of clients that often doesn't exist. “They need to evolve and realise there is not one way to practice law,” he says.
McCoy and his team have had lengthy discussions on diversity but have stopped short of publicly requiring set standards of their external advisers.
Rather, he says, they have already chosen firms that are aligned with their corporate culture. He is uncomfortable with the idea of Vodafone's external advisers working long hours just because of a law firm culture, he says, and would be receptive if any came to him with a proposal to introduce flexible or part-time working. “As a client we would welcome that,” he says. “It would be seen as a good thing and we would be happy to discuss how both we and the firm could handle it.”
All it requires, he says, is better communication and planning. But while that may work with certain areas of law, much transactional corporate work leaves little room for flexibility. Due diligence during a billion-pound takeover, for instance, could take all weekend, throughout the night, and no lawyer involved would even think of leaving the office to tend to family commitments. “It wouldn’t go down very well," Mahy says.
On the other hand, it is not insurmountable, and other industries have had to grapple with these issues. “It's a conundrum,” Mahy says, “but I do think it can be solvable.”
For Barlow’s part, he is frustrated that it has taken so long to address the problem of diversity but he is confident that things are changing. The most encouraging sign, he says, is that colleagues who have not directly experienced discrimination in the workplace are now fighting for equal rights simply because they see it as the right thing to do. "When the torch is being carried by non-gay colleagues, that’s when I know we are winning," he says.
Ultimately, he hopes that he will not have to discuss his sexuality at all – that it will simply cease to be an issue. "There will always be pockets of homophobia," he says. "You can’t legislate for that. But we will get to the point where people won’t give a damn, because it just won't be a consideration." Surely if the armed forces can get to that point, the legal profession can.