I think there is something about risk aversion within the legal profession, and I think there is this notion that if you widen your intake, to diversify your staff base, you might somehow lower standards or you might compromise excellence. There’s no evidence for this whatsoever – and there’s partly no evidence because they’re not hiring these people in the first place!
Gender, race and ethnicity have moved on a bit through client pressure. At the moment, that client pressure does not exist on social mobility. I think trying to generate that client pressure is quite an important thing, but at the moment it’s not there.
This one is harder, because what firms were able to do with gender, race and ethnicity is go to private schools and find non-white, non-males. That’s diversity of a form, but when they go through the process they’ve got the same grades, they’ve got the same cultural understanding (which is what’s really important), they reflect exactly the same soft skills – they’re just not white males.
You find in every area of this debate that the most oversubscribed firms and professions are often the most complacent. But the number of applications doesn’t actually tell you the quality, and what the legal profession hasn’t mastered is what predicts future potential as a lawyer. In the early sifting stages all that’s happening is you’re judging how well someone was taught at school.
A lot of people would be helped by professions being able to judge potential more accurately. At the moment, what the legal profession is doing is judging your past academic performance. But they know that what GCSEs, A Level results and degree results you’ve got is not actually all that helpful in proving who will make the best lawyer. You’ve got senior individuals in these professions saying, ‘I would not now get into my firm’, because they didn’t go to one of the right universities, they didn’t go to university at all perhaps, or they don’t have strings of As or A*s at A Level, and their firm wouldn’t even look at them now. And yet look at how good they’ve proven themselves to be as a lawyer.
There is a notion that, for example, the percentage of Oxbridge people you have is an indication of how smart your firm is. The key thing about this, which I think people sometimes misinterpret, is that if access to university was somehow totally independent of background – if there were some sort of test that you couldn’t be coached for, which everybody did, and the best people went to the best universities – then that might be something.
We access such a narrow range of the country’s talent. It cannot be the case that all the best people are in such a small section of the country’s population. So the reason you want to do this is to give your firm, and your profession overall, a competitive advantage.
What we’ve got to do is have the legal profession consider the way it runs its selection at the moment. If you know that half the people with the top grades go to non-Russell Group universities, why are you going to such a narrow range of universities? If you know that your A*s at GCSE, or your A Level As don’t make you a good lawyer, why make that such an important part of the process? It helps reduce the numbers, and it’s a risk aversion thing: if you’ve hired someone with a perfect academic record, then you can’t be accused of having made an obvious error that could have been avoided.
Obviously, education is hugely important and the exposure to the legal profession that you get whilst you are in education is very important. Those who are very able but who don’t get that exposure need it when they are in school.
Work experience placements are still disproportionately going to the relatives of employees or clients. We would say to people that you don’t have to stop that but don’t make it all you do, because that’s not based on how good people are, or how enthusiastic they are about the profession.
Sometimes people pooh-pooh it, thinking, ‘oh, what does a week of work experience give you?’ But actually it lets you interact with people within that profession, learn the sorts of things they’re looking for, and make connections which might help you with your applications for vacation schemes and so on, down the line.
There are things like the PRIME initiative which offers work experience placements to children on free school meals, or to children from schools with high numbers of pupils receiving free school meals, and people experimenting with other ideas. For example, Clifford Chance pioneered CV-blind recruitment for its vacation scheme, and Linklaters has committed to doubling the number of universities it takes its trainees from.
I think companies should be putting pressure on their supply chain – saying, ‘this is something we care about, and we want suppliers who care about it’.