What makes an outstanding achievement winner in The Legal 500’s eyes? Broadly speaking, the answer is going to differ markedly depending on the individual.
This year however, our seven outstanding achievement winners were united by one very obvious factor – their gender.
To mark 100 years since women were given the right to practise law in England and Wales we decided to play our own part in celebrating their efforts by awarding all of our outstanding achievement prizes to women.
While their current roles are very different, all seven of our prizewinners started their career in private practice, with most still working within law firms. All are highly regarded for the work they do in the industry – whether that’s in legal practice, management, or their efforts to transform access to the profession for women or access to justice.
Despite a host of initiatives from firms in recent years, there is no question that they are still losing too much female talent; with gender equality becoming harder to achieve the further up the seniority ranks you go.
But while their names may not currently be appearing evenly alongside their male counterparts in The Legal 500 rankings, there are already many female lawyers serving as positive role models to inspire future generations of women in law.
Those we selected for this year’s awards by no way form a definitive list and nor are they all at the end of their careers – rather our decision to recognise them reflects a wide range of ways in which women are already making a difference to the profession.
We hope that by highlighting them and sharing their stories we can play our own part in helping to gradually redress gender inequality. For this reason we will be publishing a series of interviews with our winners over the coming months in fivehundred.
The short version for why we selected our winners though – in no particular order – is as follows: