One Essex Court

One Essex Court is committed to promoting and advancing equality and diversity. Chambers does not discriminate against members, pupils, staff, applicants or clients on the basis of race, colour, ethnicity, nationality, sex, pregnancy or maternity, disability, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, religion, belief or age.

As part of our commitment to equality and diversity, Chambers ensures that all those involved in recruitment have training in fair recruitment, reviews its recruitment procedures annually and monitors the allocation of unassigned work among members and practising pupils.

Parental Leave

One Essex Court is committed to supporting members and staff taking time off following the birth or adoption of a child. Chambers’ Parental Leave Policy aims to ensure that members do not suffer financial hardship from taking time off and to encourage members to return to Chambers following parental leave. Chambers also supports flexible working for both members and staff.

Women at the Bar The Bar offers a great career for both men and women and One Essex Court is keen to ensure a strong representation of both in Chambers. Female only client/barrister events are regularly run by members and clerks, and seminars are put on by female members to provide potential applicants for pupillage with an insight into working life at the commercial Bar for women.

Recruitment – Commitment to Equality and Diversity

One Essex Court is committed to affording equality of opportunity to all applicants. Chambers encourages and welcomes applications from women, people of minority ethnic origin, people with disabilities, LGBT+ people, and other groups under-represented at the Commercial Bar. We recruit on the basis of merit alone and have a long history of offering pupillage and tenancy to individuals from a wide range of backgrounds. We want to ensure that we receive applications from a wide range of potential pupils, and assess those applications fairly. The steps we are taking to do that include:

• Providing opportunities to students from groups which are underrepresented at the Commercial Bar e.g. through our Women at the Commercial Bar Programme and Open Days.
• Ensuring our recruitment process is fair, for example by the ‘blind’ marking of written work, using RARE recruitment (a specialised recruitment company which offers a Contextualised Recruitment System (CRS), designed and built to enable employers to develop a calibrated and properly balanced approach to the process of evaluating pupillage applications) and offering unconscious bias and race training to those involved in the recruitment process.
• Providing sponsorship to a variety of university societies and initiatives which aim to promote diversity.
• Ensuring members of chambers have equal access to opportunities. More information (such as Chambers’ Parental Leave policy and diversity data) can be found on our website - https://www.oeclaw.co.uk/about-us/equality-diversity

More information can be found at https://www.oeclaw.co.uk/recruitment/commitment-to-equality-and-diversity

Mentoring and other opportunities

One Essex Court has a long-standing involvement in mentoring and other support schemes designed to improve equality of opportunity and diversity at the Bar. One Essex Court founded and ran a women’s mentoring scheme from 2019-2022, was one of the co-founders of what is now the COMBAR mentoring scheme for underrepresented groups, and is a partner of the Bridging the Bar mini-pupillage scheme.

Charitable support

• Advocate - One Essex Court is a Silver Circle Pro Bono Patron of Advocate, a charity that matches members of the public who need free legal help to volunteer barristers. One Essex Court was delighted to be shortlisted for Pro Bono Chambers of the Year award at the 2022 Bar Pro Bono Awards. This nomination recognised One Essex Court’s strong commitment to pro bono work, recent examples of which included 10 members of One Essex Court completing Advocate’s 25 hours as part of the 25th year anniversary challenge.
• Free Representation Unit (FRU) – One Essex Court continues to provide financial contributions to this charity which provides free legal representation for the public.
• Pro Bono Connect – One Essex Court continues to support this scheme set up by Jamie Goldsmith KC which matches barristers/solicitors acting pro bono in civil matters to individuals, charities and community groups who cannot afford legal advice/representation. In addition to Jamie Goldsmith KC, a significant number of other barristers from One Essex Court are currently involved with the scheme.