Switalskis Solicitors

We are committed to creating a fair and inclusive environment for all employees, clients and visitors. Respect, equality and inclusion is central to the ethos of the Switalskis group and forms the heart of our firm’s values.

We commissioned a review of our working practices to address any areas that we feel were working well and to identify how as a business we could implement better practice.

The paper identified the need to name a new ED&I Lead, who would assume responsibility for strategy relating to policy, standards being met and monitoring as necessary. With our new Head of People (HR), we are rolling out an ED&I Steering Group to drive activity and visibility across the group. Such involvement will be available to all employees and will be driven by our new interactive SwitsHub (intranet).

We have updated our policy so that it shows our commitment to include a specific Trans and non-binary inclusion policy. We encourage individuality and choice.

As demonstrated in our gender pay report, we pride ourselves in equality throughout our business.

We are actively reviewing our recruitment policy to ensure it is progressive and remains in line with our ethos. We recognise contextualised recruitment may assist in uncovering external factors that may have contributed to a candidate’s grades and experience to assist in identifying self-motivated, driven, outperformers. The fact that an individual has overcome many barriers to achieve a certain outcome demonstrates they might well have performed even better if those barriers were removed. We are a business who welcome applications from minority sectors that otherwise may not feel they are afforded the same opportunities.

We are keen and proud to continue supporting our community. Examples of the support include:

• In sponsored partnership with Paces Sheffield - a specialist Yorkshire-based charity, centre, and school for individuals with cerebral palsy and motor disorders
• Bradford City Football Club women - player sponsorship
• We are actively involved with the Leeds Powerchair Football Club and the Yorkshire Powerchair Football League including sponsorship of the team’s kit
• We support Aspirations Day at Mount Pleasant Primary School in Huddersfield
• We offer regular voluntary work for the UK-wide brain injury charity Headway in Barnsley
• Our colleague, Christine Griffiths is a trustee for Disability Sheffield
• Our colleague, Toby Netting hosts an annual guest lecture to Family Law undergraduates at Sheffield Hallam University
• Our colleague, Ruth Coneron supports events at Huddersfield University, inspiring and helping the next generation of family and care lawyers by speaking to students in particular to support the BAME community
• We offer Pro bono work to service users at Huddersfield University Family Law clinic, whilst allowing students to shadow the team in particular to support the BAME community.

Our people are our greatest asset to a successful business and we recognise that in order to achieve equality, diversity and inclusion for all we must strive for progression and thus create fairness for all