About

Team size: 25

Major legal advisers: Lewis Silkin, Slaughter and May

Bereavement following the death of a close family member led to Anna Suchopar, interim GC at fashion giant ASOS, launching a series of one-day events for lawyers exploring difficult societal issues.

To get the ball rolling, Suchopar last year invited her legal advisers to an event dedicated to talking about mental health and sharing experiences at ASOS’s offices. Firms were invited to be introspective and think about mental wellbeing issues they might have in their firms through small group sessions. ‘Before people leave the session we ask them to commit to actions and we give them practical tools, like manager toolkits for spotting the signs that somebody is struggling,’ Suchopar says. ‘We decided that we wanted to use our power as buyers of legal services to talk to our lawyers about topics that are really important but that don’t often get the air time.’

Sean Dempsey, an employment partner at Lewis Silkin, comments: ‘Anna and her team encouraged the attendees to take forward their action points and report back to them with any developments that might be of interest to all of the attendees. I cannot think of an initiative more worthy of recognition than this.’

The mental health talk followed the success of an earlier session that Suchopar – who took on the company’s top legal role on an interim-basis just under a year ago – initiated in 2018, looking at diversity and inclusion. Participants were surveyed about diversity in their legal teams and were asked to think about two questions: do law firms have a problem with diversity and do they have problems retaining a diverse workforce? The lawyers were then invited back to ASOS for a half a day to hear the findings of the data.

Says Suchopar: ‘We found that legal teams are balanced at the point of entry, but as people progress to partner, firms struggle to maintain diverse teams. Interestingly, most respondents thought that the legal profession as a whole does have a diversity problem, but most thought that their own firms did not.’

The plan is for the topic to be explored in a presentation every 18 months. ‘Unconscious bias training is important too – I made everybody in the legal team go through it and we were the first team within ASOS to complete it,’ she adds. ‘We are not trying to claim that ASOS’s legal team is perfect either, but the profession will be better if we’re all prepared to stand together and shine a light on the awkward topics.’