Inclusive Hiring Practices: A Pathway to Social Mobility for Trainee Solicitors in the UK Legal Industry

Nov 30, 2023

Written By Hugo Carter

One method to adequately provide sufficient access to legal justice is to provide accessible routes to practising law, which is facilitated by inclusive hiring practices. This article seeks to demonstrate how and why inclusive hiring practices are a powerful tool to provide a pathway for social mobility in the legal industry.

Inclusive Hiring

Historically, the UK legal profession has been dominated by the white middle class, and this historical association continues to linger today. According to the SRA, while 92.5% of the UK population attends state schools, just 78% of lawyers attended state schools. The legal profession needs to address these imbalances and promote diversity, in order to foster a truly inclusive industry which affords justice for everyone.

Inclusive hiring is one of the ways this can be done. It's the practice of reducing bias and promoting diversity within the hiring process. Inclusive hiring is both active and passive. This means that it includes blind recruitment (where candidates are assessed on their merits alone, without contextual information), as well as schemes that seek to improve diversity. These may include supporting candidates from underrepresented groups through recruitment cycles or outreach programmes that bolster awareness of legal career pathways in certain communities.

The importance of active inclusive hiring practices cannot be overstated: many of the barriers to the legal profession for minority and lower socio-economic groups are entrenched and meritocratic recruitment filters will not remove them entirely. With programmes and systems that actively go beyond traditional recruitment methods, inclusive hiring practices balance out these entrenched barriers and create a level playing field for all candidates.

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The impact of inclusive hiring on social mobility

Perhaps more than any other profession, law has a vested interest in equity and inclusion: after all, the law is omnipresent. To command and serve everyone, the operation of the law should include and involve everyone. When the system reflects the diversity of the community it serves, it will operate to a greater satisfaction of everyone.

By presenting equitable (not merely equal) pathways to law, inclusive hiring practices redress imbalances of circumstance and dismantle the systemic barriers to the legal profession. In doing so, inclusive hiring can create a more inclusive and prosperous legal profession.

Current landscape of inclusive hiring in UK law firms

So what hiring programmes are already in place? To name a few:

Aspiring Solicitors
Black Solicitors Network
PRIME
Rare Recruitment

Many law firms are partnering with external inclusive hiring initiatives, but they may also have their own in-house schemes.

Many trainee solicitors have begun their legal journey through inclusive hiring practices and become flourishing lawyers. Aspiring Solicitors, for instance, has a plethora of success stories that illustrate the impact of these schemes.

One such success story depicts how these schemes can benefit prospective trainees from diverse backgrounds:

Zana Bakali, Future Trainee Solicitor at Skadden, utilised the AS First and Aspire schemes to comprehend the skills required of a lawyer. Subsequently, open days, including the AS Women in Law Event, afforded her an insight into the operation of the legal industry. Ultimately, Aspiring Solicitors offered her the platform to learn, participate, and thrive within law, culminating in a training contract at one of the most prestigious law firms in the world.

Stories like Zana’s are testament to the profound difference that active inclusive hiring practices can make, and their contribution to building a diverse and dynamic legal workforce.

The role of legal education in inclusive hiring

Whether consciously or not, the legal industry tends to favour the top UK universities for hiring trainees. To this end, educational institutions bear great responsibility in furthering inclusivity and diversity. They have three major responsibilities: first, inclusive admissions policies; second, aiding pupils throughout their education; third, assisting pupils in attaining training contracts.

Moreover, legal education has a responsibility to teach inclusivity in its curricula. This can be in the manner of this article: teaching how and why inclusivity matters. It can also be within the legal education itself. For instance, Paul Stephenson’s influence on the development of civil rights for black people in Britain, to show the influence of minorities in the development of the UK legal system. Awareness of this history fosters a workforce better equipped to champion inclusivity in the future.

Challenges and solutions in implementing inclusive hiring

There are several challenges that any law firm will face in implementing inclusive hiring practices. These include: unconscious biases; systemic barriers relating to historical recruitment practices; and the need for cultural change. It’s important that firms acknowledge and address these challenges in their attempt to implement meaningful progress towards inclusivity.

There are, however, many innovative solutions and strategies to overcome these challenges. Here’s just a few:

Leveraging technology to account for diverse backgrounds in the initial stages of recruitment (e.g. Rare’s Contextual Recruitment)
Implementing comprehensive training programmes to train staff on unconscious bias and strategies to avoid it;
Establishing mentoring initiatives where current lawyers take on an aspiring lawyer and guide them through their legal education and applications;
Holding insight days for first-year students from low-income or other underrepresented backgrounds. Introduce them to the legal industry and dispel any apprehension they may have to a legal career.

Measuring the success of inclusive hiring practices

It is important to establish measurable metrics for success and consistently evaluate whether changes in the hiring process have led to a change in recruitment outcomes and retention rates. To do so, firms should set key performance indicators (KPIs). Here are some example KPIs using standard KPIs from DEI reports:

Percentages of trainees by gender/percentage of total employees by gender
Percentage of employees by race and ethnicity
Total employee breakdowns: age; sexual orientation; socio-economic background; disability.

It is important to highlight here that inclusivity cannot be reduced to “quota-hitting” (as hopefully is evident in this article). Improving diversity is merely an indicator of the success of wide-ranging, nuanced, and cultural policies across an entire firm.

Furthermore, to effectively implement inclusive hiring is to continuously reevaluate and improve current practices and processes. Just as firms have to adapt their legal work to evolve with the ever-changing laws, the firms themselves must evolve their hiring practices to remain at the forefront of creating an inclusive legal profession.

However, unlike the competitiveness of legal services, inclusivity should be a collaborative endeavour across the sector. We would encourage law firms to share their successful techniques and strategies that have aided inclusive hiring with other firms seeking to improve their processes. Indeed, advocacy for inclusive hiring should occur across the industry with firms, legal associations and regulatory bodies working in tandem to promote systemic change.

Conclusion

Inclusive hiring has the power to increase access to justice for everyone, by transforming the legal industry alike into a thriving diverse community that embodies multiculturalism, innovation and collaboration. This is particularly important for the law, as it must reflect those that it serves.

Law firms, legal professionals, and educational institutions should all actively participate in and champion inclusive hiring practices, such as those highlighted in this article. Individual actors cannot change an entire profession - there is a collective responsibility on all agents within the legal industry to create a representative and accessible justice system.

Although this article has focused on inclusive hiring practices, the drive for inclusivity does not stop at the entrance. Equity and inclusion must permeate all practices of the legal profession. Although diversity of trainees can slowly change this culture, we all have a responsibility to call out any barriers for diversity and work towards real change.

Diversity