Do lawyers have a key part to play in diversity and inclusion (D&I)? My gut says yes, we have elevated responsibilities in terms of fiduciary duties and as regulated professionals, so I believe we should hold ourselves to a heightened standard, but everyone has a role to play. I wouldn’t want to say that legal has an obligation to do anything different to the rest of our colleagues, but the fact is we are often, as a profession, at the forefront of things. I don’t think anyone should abdicate their responsibility towards D&I – because it is ultimately about doing the right thing.
I think back to the landmark US Supreme Court case [Brown v Board of Education, concerning segregation in education] where the Court held that racial segregation in schools, provided it was ‘separate but equal’, was actually a violation of constitutional law. Many felt that was a decision that rightly rested with the legislature and that change should have been brought about by the evolution of societal views about civil rights and equality. I disagree. The law was just wrong and change needed to occur, and the power to make that change fell to the judiciary. Lawyers are trained and need to be critical thinkers about what is right and fair and just, and so personally I think we do need to set a standard.
There are specific D&I initiatives within the BT legal team but we also benefit from the wider efforts within BT. In the last few years, I think we have made significant progress in implementing a culture that encourages and creates diversity and inclusivity. Dan Fitz (group general counsel) has been instrumental in this in both arenas. In legal, specifically, when Dan first joined BT in 2010, we didn’t have a representative number of women in leadership roles, so that was one of the first initiatives he launched, tasking a team to look specifically into the issues that women felt were preventing them from progressing.
Since then, we have seen a step change in that area. A lot of that is because we have focused on coaching, mentoring and developing women and giving them opportunities to succeed, so our junior women now see role models with whom they can identify. We have also seen a resurgence in our company-wide women’s network and many of our female colleagues in the legal, governance and compliance teams participate in that as well.
We are also focused on social mobility in the wider legal profession, and I am particularly proud of our work experience programme that we run in legal, governance and compliance. We get asked all the time by friends and colleagues about students coming into work to learn more about what we do, and, in law, in particular, that type of experience is critical to obtaining opportunities to enter the profession. We know that securing training contracts and pupillages can be a barrier to entry for many, so we wanted to do something less nepotistic to create opportunities for those that don’t have contacts and might not otherwise have that differentiating factor on their CVs. We decided to work with an organisation called ‘Pathways To Law’ (part of The Sutton Trust) and created a specific week-long programme, which we also opened up to an equal number of students who could apply directly to BT through a friend or family member who works for BT. We started small, opening it up to five students from each pool of applicants.
What surprised us and gave us an additional chance to really have an impact was how popular the scheme was for the BT ‘friends and family’ group. We advertised for these positions over just three days and got 90 applicants! We had to apply some levelling criteria and we decided a key one was to select students who hadn’t had the opportunity to work in law firms and who didn’t have obvious connections and relations.
In addition to our work experience programme, I’ve personally been involved with starting a mentoring programme in legal, governance and compliance and, most recently, am working with our LGBT+ network to create a company-wide Allies programme.
I’ll be honest, I’ve found mentoring to be really difficult. The hardest part is matching someone with the right mentor. If someone doesn’t connect with their mentor, despite all the will in the world, it will be fruitless. We’re revamping the questions we used originally, because they didn’t ask the right things, and a lot of matching came down to gut feel. As a company- wide initiative we’re also looking at a mentor- matching programme like a dating app.
It’s also important to help mentors and mentees focus on getting the most out of the relationship. We provided guidance that the mentee should come prepared with what to talk about, and the mentor should make the first contact, but it really is up to the individuals. Last week, I had a meeting with a mentee who has never been mentored before, so I challenged him to set the agenda, saying, ‘it is your time, so think about whatever you want to get out of it. Make the most out of the time someone senior wants to give you.’
Conversely, work experience has been a lot less work than you might think it is, because you can recycle plans and elements of the work projects and experiences and, if you do it right, you can also get real benefits from their engagement.
Last year, my team was in the first part of a project to rewrite all of BT’s standard B2B terms and conditions to make them more clear, simple and balanced. We asked the work experience students to compare the newer versions of the contracts, one in plain English and one in traditional legal language, to make sure we were being consistent and weren’t missing anything. It was a fantastic piece of work for them as it was real work and it really helped them understand how the law works in practice. It also gave us real-world feedback on our approach so we made a lot of changes based on their comments! We are rolling out the second part of the project this year, so we will be getting them involved with that as well.
Going it alone can often be the best way as you can create something that really works for you and you foster external relationships, but, working with others can enable you to focus on the aspects of the programme where you find most value. For example, where we are working with the Pathways to Law programme in work experience, that made the most sense given the breadth and depth of their scope, which already focused on social mobility and has a large pool of talented candidates. So, rather than spending our time on ‘recruiting’ candidates, we can focus on the quality of the programme. In all cases, when starting out, I would recommend focusing on the aims of the programme and building a strategy around that, ensuring it is sustainable. It’s worth doing regularly, not ad hoc – that has much more impact.
Diverse leadership defines the cultural agenda and creates a space where everyone can look at them and say, ‘that could be me’. That’s why work experience for me was so important. If we can get all sorts of individuals who represent the true fabric of our culture into the profession, then it will move through in a pervasive way. You can’t ask why we don’t have any diverse candidates for senior roles if we aren’t creating opportunities for those individuals throughout their careers, starting with the entry level. I think role models are critical. If you gave me a choice between a mentor or a role model, I’d have a role model. For me, I don’t think anything can come close to looking at someone and saying, ‘I can be that person’.