Fox Williams LLP

The firm is committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive culture.

We are proud of our dynamic, creative and diverse workforce and want to attract the most talented individuals to join us. We strongly believe that diversity is critical to our success as a business: a more diverse workforce encourages fresh thinking, new perspectives and different approaches to our clients’ issues.

Our People: “We treat each other as we would want to be treated: with respect.”

The concept of “Our People” is the centre of our core values and we seek to understand and celebrate what makes each of us unique. We are committed to ensuring that each individual is valued, respected and treated fairly at work. As part of that commitment, we also focus on the physiological and psychological health and wellbeing of our staff.

Fox Williams is a signatory to the Law Society’s Diversity and Inclusion Charter and we are committed to promoting diversity, equality and inclusion and achieving best practice in our recruitment, retention and career progression practices. Our inclusivity initiatives are led by our Diversity and Inclusion partner, Sona Ganatra, and our HR partner Blair Wright together with our Diversity and Inclusion Forum.

Our current Diversity and Inclusion initiatives include:

Education and celebration: Our active D&I Forum encourage participation across the firm to mark important occasions throughout the year to better understand and celebrate the backgrounds and interests of our diverse workforce. As part of our D&I “Bringing the Outside In” calendar of events this year, we have hosted external speakers on Trans and Non-binary education, Imposter Syndrome, organised city history walks for Black History month, and published an FW cookbook for World Culture Day.

Staff wellbeing: We have a wide ranging programme of events to raise awareness of the importance of mental and physical well-being for everyone in the firm including access to a clinical psychologist, mental health first aiders, gyms discounts, cycle to work schemes.

Flexible working: We recognise that some of us may have commitments outside of work; whether that is caring for family members or a keen interest in sport. A significant proportion of our staff currently work on a flexible basis, enabling them to balance different aspects of their lives.

Agile working:  Following our experience of remote working over the last 18 months we want to support Our People to maintain the benefits from a more agile approach to work. Our new approach will be to offer a 50:50 split between home and office working to all.

Working parents: We understand the need for parents to balance family obligations and we have matched our enhanced shared parental pay with our enhanced maternity pay. We are a member of Cityparents and all our staff have access to a programme of seminars aimed at helping working parents.

Mentoring: In addition to providing excellent professional training to our staff, we also offer a mentoring scheme to our lawyers, to provide additional support and guidance.

Addressing the Ethnicity Pay Gap and the Gender Pay Gap: We want to ensure that we retain and support all of our talented lawyers and staff. We report on a voluntary basis to our staff on our gender pay gap and our ethnicity pay gap. We have a number of initiatives underway to assist addressing those gaps, including a partner sponsorship programme to our senior associates and legal directors.

Reverse Mentoring:  we have recently completed a  reverse mentoring scheme with our Board and are now taking forward the challenges put forward by the participants including reviewing our recruitment processes.

Volunteering: We encourage and provide opportunities to our staff to volunteer for projects which are important to them through offering half a day per quarter (two days per year) out of the office to spend with charities of their choice.

Partnerships: We are proud to partner with and offer mentor relationships to students from Upreach, an organisation committed to improving social mobility by creating the conditions for undergraduates from less advantaged backgrounds to access and sustain top graduate jobs.