Turning the tables
Minority lawyers hit home diversity message
March 29, 2006 at 07:03 PM
2 minute read
There was an air of quiet satisfaction at the launch of the Black Solicitors Network's (BSN's) inaugural diversity league table on Monday night.
Not because of the results of the survey – which made predictable reading – but because of the high level of law firm participation. Sixty of the top 100 firms took part, while many others indicated that they will join in next year once they have gathered together the relevant statistics.
Back in November 2003, Legal Week conducted a similar exercise to determine the number of ethnic minority partners at the top 20 UK firms. The results were just as unimpressive as those unearthed by the BSN (2.5% of the partners among the top 20 were from an ethnic minority, as opposed to 3% of those in the top 100 in the BSN research). Equally depressing was the discovery that about half of the top 20 firms were failing to monitor the career paths of their ethnic minority trainees.
This smacked of a box-ticking approach to diversity. After all, you cannot begin to tackle a problem unless you know precisely what it is.
The level of participation in the BSN survey suggests that the debate has moved on. The Government can take some credit for this. In November, Department for Constitutional Affairs (DCA) minister Bridget Prentice wrote to the top 100 firms asking them to publish data about their demographic make-up by the end of this month. The initiative sprang from a DCA report on diversity, which made a series of sensible, if hardly revolutionary, recommendations. One of them – that public bodies should "give consideration" to requiring firms tendering for work to provide diversity-related data – was seized on by BSN director Michael Webster on Monday. While a (very small) handful of UK clients are moving in this direction, nothing would put diversity more firmly on the agenda than such a move. Unfortunately, the European Union has put a spanner in the works, given that it would breach the procurement rules.
In the meantime, the BSN deserves credit for the success of its effort to engage with the UK's elite firms. It may not have broken down the barriers but it has, in the words of BSN chair Yvonne Brown, "prised open those wonderful polished doors".
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