UK - BusinessLondon law firms are under growing client pressure to promote more women and people from ethnic and other minorities, according to the new head of one of the largest firms.
Big firms were lagging behind other sectors on diversity and needed to do better for business reasons, said Simon Davies, managing partner of Linklaters.
His remarks come as leading firms – driven by customer comments, the threat of lawsuits and worries about recruitment – are setting up initiatives aimed at attracting those who have felt unwelcome in a historically conservative profession.
Mr Davies said Linklaters, the second-largest London firm, had decided it needed to do better in part because it was receiving an increasing number of requests for diversity statistics from clients to whom it was pitching. He cited the “helpful” impetus from customers such as JPMorgan, the US bank. He said: “If clients are pushing for things it’s more tangibly a business need.”
Mr Davies said the firm’s work would benefit from input apart from simply the “male Caucasian” view. He gave as an example the rescue of a large company, where women lawyers might “better understand” the impact on families of job losses.
Linklaters was starting a programme of spotting and supporting talented people, in response to the “fair criticism” that law firms had failed to match even the limited progress on diversity made elsewhere in business.
The self-criticism echoes client accusations that the industry is still too clubbable and shows more zeal for turning large profits than in modernising.
Big firms accept the starkness of diversity statistics that show women accounting for 50 per cent of trainees but rarely more than 20 per cent of partners.
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer says it is trying to “improve its understanding of what practices and cultures can be changed to encourage female lawyers to stay longer”.
Rosemary Martin, general counsel for Reuters, the media group, and former deputy chair of the GC100 group of company in-house counsel, said: “Any company ... sees that diversity is a very important aspect of their success. And they expect to see that reflected in their major suppliers.” Firms are also considered too traditional and – even when they attract significant numbers of non-white lawyers – stubbornly homogenous in terms of class and privilege.
