The legal profession has finally put social diversity 'on the agenda'. Georgina Stanley asks if it will be enough to counter an increasingly unequal British society

No matter how much the profession prefers to avert its gaze, the picture remains unremittingly bleak. Statistics can be made to prove pretty much anything their author chooses but, however you cut them, the stats around social mobility in law look dire. Utterly dire.

True, law firms are obviously not the stuffy gentlemen's clubs they once were – not least because of the large number of women entering the profession.

But when it comes to social background, law firms are only at the bottom of a very high mountain. Just 7% of the UK population is educated in fee-paying independent schools but their graduates make up more than half of partners at magic circle law firms according to educational charity the Sutton Trust. Look at the Bar and the figures are even more stark, with around 68% of barristers at leading chambers independently educated and a staggering 80% of them graduates of Oxford or Cambridge universities.

Of course, the problem is not unique to the legal profession – media and medicine have also fared badly on social diversity in recent years – but law is the profession with the highest percentage of independently educated workers.

The problem this causes is threefold. Not only does it make the legal profession remote from the society it is supposed to serve and make it an unattainable career aspiration for a majority of the population, it also means law firms are in danger of churning out armies of lawyers drawn from chokingly narrow social strata with an inevitable narrowing of their professional perspective.

That's the bad news. The more upbeat perspective is that there has been a notable shift in the profession's attitude. Galvanised to an extent by a much-publicised 2009 report by a panel chaired by former minister Alan Milburn on access to the professions, which dubbed them a "closed shop" for the privileged, social mobility has since clearly moved up the agenda of major law firms.

This has spawned and expanded a host of initiatives as law firms move to support Government-sponsored projects and launch ventures of their own such as PRIME – the industry-wide work experience programme launched by 23 founding law firms last year.

David Morley, the comprehensive school-educated senior partner of magic circle firm Allen & Overy (A&O), who has become one of the most visible supporters of social mobility in law, explains: "There are two aspects to all this: the first is that all professions – including law – need to be drawing from a wider pool of people in order to stay relevant. It can't be good in the long run not to because (a) you're excluding people; and (b) it puts professions out of touch with society. The second issue is simple fairness: there are a lot of people out there like me who got the chance in the 70s and 80s when the profession was opening up and they want to correct the balance."

Dick Tyler, CMS Cameron McKenna's thoughtful senior partner, strikes a similar note: "If we want a legal system that's relevant to everyone, we need to recruit from the right mix of backgrounds – we should reflect society as a whole and not a subgroup, but that isn't happening right now."

The challenge and first responses

While both the problem and the legal sector's apparent desire to fix it have become more evident, what remains unclear is how much progress the profession is likely to make. The biggest challenge is both obvious and terribly hard to overcome: the manifest inequities of the UK's educational system, which provides good schooling to a relatively privileged minority of the population, leaving the rest to fare with education and career advice that is either mediocre or just plain awful.

The result of that educational apartheid is plainly illustrated in figures from the Sutton Trust and the aforementioned Milburn report.

Gaining entry to any of the UK's leading professions is vastly easier if you have the right background and education, and no other profession demonstrates the scale of the issue as well as law. Indeed, the Milburn report cites evidence that those from poor backgrounds on average actually have to achieve superior grades to more privileged counterparts in order to secure places in the most prestigious universities.

And marginal improvements in the overall number of state-educated lawyers at the Bar or top law firms over the last 15 years are undermined by additional findings that, for lawyers under 40, the number who were privately educated has increased. The Milburn report also shows a sharp relative increase in the family wealth of senior lawyers in recent years. While the average lawyer born in 1958 came from a family with an income around 40% higher than the UK average, that figure had risen to over 60% for lawyers born in 1970.

Perhaps the first sign of an imaginative response to such intractable challenges was the Pathways to Law programme. Set up by the Sutton Trust and the College of Law in conjunction with several leading universities and law firms, the project now helps 400 A-level students a year from disadvantaged backgrounds win a place at leading universities to study law, through mentoring and support.

The venture, which is supported by many leading City law firms and seven leading universities, also includes some work placements.

Pathways to Law is a well regarded project that could provide a credible model to build upon for the profession, though a neutral observer may wonder what it says about the UK that straight A students from poor backgrounds need this level of coaching to get on. So much for meritocracy.

James Turner, projects director at the Sutton Trust, comments: "Law firms have risen to the challenge. We're doing more with them than we were five years ago and more with them than other professions, although there is still a long way to go."

Another way in which the profession could be prodded into action is if a strong economic case were made to recruit from a wider pool. Much of the issue is the high number of people who flock to law, meaning that law firms are dealing with huge oversupply. This allows them to be – in economic terms – relatively 'wasteful' with talent and focus on those who fit narrowly defined criteria. In some cases, such criteria are used to filter the vast number of applicants. The absence of incentives to look wider has clearly had a corrosive impact on social diversity in law, as it has in other high status careers that attract many graduates.

However, several sizeable research efforts in the US have indicated that law firms' overwhelming focus on academic high-flyers has its drawbacks, partly due to such indicators being so heavily influenced by social background but also because such 'elite' candidates are the least committed to the law.

US research published in 2009 tracked 5,000 lawyers who began practising in 2000 and found that by picking students from a handful of prestigious institutions, law firms were bulk recruiting individuals with such a sense of entitlement that they were not the best long-term prospects. It concluded that firms should widen their recruitment to promising candidates from second-tier institutions as these individuals would value the job more and make the long-term commitment necessary to mature into strong partners. In contrast, graduates from leading universities were far more likely to treat law as a stepping stone to other things.

In a similar vein, research published this year by The National Law Journal about which universities were attended by partners at top 250 US law firms found a similar picture: mid-tier institutions on the face of it appeared to be a far better 'investment' for law firms in terms of candidates making partner than elite institutions like Harvard or Stanford.

None of this is to suggest that academic performance or attendance at highly-regarded universities is not an important benchmark of performance, but it does suggest the profession's prescriptive focus on a certain 'kind' of candidate can at times generate negative or perverse results.

All of this is before addressing the well-established body of research demonstrating that access to quality education is strongly linked to privilege – meaning that academic performance is a less reliable benchmark of intellectual rigour or individual drive than the legal profession often admits.

Collectively, this dynamic has contributed to a model in which the profession recruits from a relatively select band of the potential workforce, forcing law firms to pay high wages and work their staff extremely long hours to make the numbers stack up. A neutral observer introduced to the law for the first time might have trouble working out the economic logic of such arrangements.

Inside the box

While there is as yet little evidence of law firms planning to fundamentally change how they hire, there has clearly been a shift in the profession's mindset on social mobility.

As Norton Rose chairman Stephen Parish comments: "It is probably fair to say that other forms of discrimination have had more profile in the past and that social mobility is only recently coming to the fore. But it is not about looking good in front of clients or the media, it is about providing access to a wider group of talented people, and that is something that we can all benefit from."

Ashurst head of diversity Deborah Dalgleish comments: "There are many misconceptions about law and it is not as representative as it could be. With the increase in [university] tuition fees, it is now particularly important that students with potential are not put off law as a career because they think they do not have the right social credentials."

Even firms that have not opted to join PRIME, such as Wragge & Co, are focusing on numerous existing projects, ranging from work experience to mentoring.

Measures differ significantly between law firms. A&O, for example, which also supports the Pathways to Law programme, is focusing its current efforts primarily at the work experience point to help raise the aspirations of inner-city kids.

In contrast, Linklaters is taking a broader approach. The firm has recently agreed to run five formal non-legal apprenticeships for support staff roles. It will be paying people identified with the London borough of Islington the London living wage – in the region of £15,000 annually – during the course of the apprenticeship to help get them back into permanent employment.

Meanwhile, by using its PRIME work experience project in conjunction with its commitment to Pathways, it plans to take its first small steps towards tackling the elephant in the room when it comes to social mobility – actually recruiting those from disadvantaged backgrounds as lawyers.

As such, Linklaters has begun trying to identify students from disadvantaged backgrounds that meet its academic intake targets as a means of proactively widening its recruitment. The firm hopes to track them and potentially invite them onto some of its university programmes – making the jump from passively waiting to receive applications from those from disadvantaged backgrounds to seeking them out.

"Our experience shows it's possible to find people with the right grades but more difficult backgrounds," says Linklaters global diversity head Felix Hebblethwaite. "It's just harder. It's about working with organisations such as Pure Potential and the Social Mobility Foundation and thinking more laterally."

While Linklaters is not alone in this move, the matter of recruitment is an area in clear need of further improvement.

Law firms are only now at the point of starting to monitor the social and educational background of their staff ahead of controversial plans by the Legal Services Board (LSB) to make law firms publish details of their diversity statistics – including social mobility. The LSB plans mean firms will have to publish data about the socio-economic background, age, race and gender of their workforce. The Solicitors Regulation Authority has yet to announce how it plans to implement the proposals due to take effect from later this year.

A number of firms have already started disclosing diversity statistics in anticipation of this. These include Linklaters, where 53% of UK partners said they were part of the first generation of their family to go to university, compared with 30% of associates and 22% of trainees. The stats found 38% of UK partners and lawyers were privately educated.

CMS' first report on diversity statistics found 29% of trainees were educated at independent schools compared with 35% of partners and 25% of UK staff, with 48% of partners in the first generation of their family to go to university compared with 40% of associates. Most of the firm's lawyers went to a Russell Group university.

What firms do not have – and seemingly have little intention of introducing – are targets for the number of recruits they hope to bring in from outside the traditional privileged mould. Currently, law firms also have no intention of lowering their entrance requirements to reflect an academically uneven playing field.

This comes despite the fact that there will certainly be more pressure on social diversity in view of the current increase in fees which means universities can charge up to £9,000 a year. In addition, the gloomy economy means trainee intakes are already being scaled back at many firms, only increasing the challenge for non-traditional candidates to get their foot in the door.

Certainly firms seem to be a long way from thinking more laterally about ways to deal with the issue such as, for example, accounting-style school leaver programmes that combine work with university courses, or the idea of recruiting from smaller 'feeder' law firms, where candidates from different backgrounds have already proved themselves.

Too often the profession falls back on blaming the lack of social diversity on the inability to provide good schooling to much of the population on one hand without following through on the obvious conclusion that the result of this is not quite the meritocracy that is claimed.

"We can and must broaden access but, at the same time, we're a highly meritocratic profession and very competitive so we can't lower the bar," says Tyler (pictured). "It's true that A-level grades and university degrees aren't conclusive proof of anything and you should never write people off but, on the other hand, we're in the nice position that we get many more applicants than we have places for and we have to apply filters somewhere. In the future we're all expecting to have to raise our game in terms of recruitment."

Different agendas

There is no doubt that law firms have started to embrace the issue of social mobility and there is also no question of the sincerity of many individuals in the profession to change things. All the intentions in the world could result in very little tangible change, though, without a significant shift in law firms' recruitment strategies. For one, law firms will need to revisit more of the assumptions they use when filtering candidates.

What is needed is a more holistic approach that tackles not just the raising of aspirations and understanding of law as a career but the more difficult task of targeting potential candidates earlier and offering support through the recruitment process. The increase in tuition fees could also mean firms need to look again at what they are doing in terms of bursaries.

The much publicised current review of legal education could also provide one answer if it can make good on moves to help support credible work-based routes to qualification, paths which typically benefit candidates from a wider social background than academically-focused routes.

The main reason for optimism is that social diversity is no longer a forgotten issue. That is important, but it is only half the battle. 'Soft issue' causes can stay high up 'the agenda' for decades without leading to much change. The profession should also be wary of fooling itself that more progress has been made than actually has. A poll of partner attitudes conducted for this article suggests the profession believes more ground has been achieved in opening access to the profession than is supported by independent research (see box, above).

But it can only be a positive sign that a series of once fragmented initiatives are beginning to be joined up – as can seen in the case of PRIME and a broadly comparable venture for the Bar announced last month dubbed Pegasus.

As the Milburn report argues, professions have a unique capability to drive social changes in societies and economies, opening up horizons, building a country's skill base and providing leadership on fairness and opportunity. Law has as big a role to play as any. If the law can't be fair – or at least attempt to be – what is it for?

The profession has accepted that an issue exists, but it will have to challenge more of its own assumptions about what has made the UK one of the most unequal developed economies, and professions like the law the preserve of the privileged few.

As Morley concludes: "I don't support the idea of a counsel of despair that says we can't solve everything so we won't solve anything. We can't do anything about tuition fees or change the education system, but, with work experience, everyone can chip in and help make a contribution, and there's an incredible amount of goodwill. In the long run I think it's important for our business not to have an industry of clones. It wouldn't be right for the profession and it wouldn't be fair."

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Social mobility – those grim numbers

Education

• 7% of the UK population are in fee paying, independent schools.*
• Of students getting straight As at A-level, one-third went to independent schools.*
• Five of the top private schools get more students into Oxbridge than the bottom 2,000 state schools.*
• More than half of secondary schools in the 10% most deprived parts of England do not attain 30% of students getting five good GCSEs.+

The law

• 68% of barristers at leading chambers went to independent schools.*
• 51% of magic circle partners over 40 went to independent school compared with 71% of those under 39.*
• 82% of barristers and 78% of judges studied at Oxbridge.*
• 38% of trainees joining magic circle firms between September 2008 and March 2010 attended Oxford or Cambridge.^
• The typical lawyer of the future will today be growing up in a family better off than five in six of all families in the UK.+

*The Sutton Trust

^ Legal Week

+ Milburn report

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Partner attitudes on social diversity

Two-thirds of partners (66%) think the legal profession is too elitist according to research by Legal Week which shows that a similar percentage believe law firms are not doing enough to address the issue.

Responses from more than 100 partners polled for the article found just over half of respondents (51%) believed law is too elitist, with a further 15% believing the situation is so bad it has become a 'career for the privileged few'.

While nearly 65% said the level of social diversity and mobility within commercial law is better than it was 20 years ago, 19% believed it is worse.

Sixty-five percent of respondents said it is important for the legal profession to promote and improve social diversity and mobility, with a further 21% stating this to be 'quite important'.

Despite their beliefs, most respondents think City law firms have yet to make significant progress in the area. Only 21% said they thought law firms' current initiatives to open access to the profession were either 'effective' or 'very effective', with 18% stating they were not very good and a further 7% arguing existing measures are 'very poor'. The remainder (53%) said they 'could be better'.

One respondent to Legal Week's survey says: "Law firms are starting to say the right thing, but when it comes down to reality, recruiting from known backgrounds is the natural point of safety and one most find difficult to draw away from. Ways of working and assumptions about what good looks like need to be properly challenged if we're going to make any progress."

The research found that while partners may be keen to improve social mobility, they do not agree with the idea that recruitment based on academic results could hinder progress.

Seventy-six percent of respondents said the level of importance law firms put on academic performance during the recruitment process is either 'entirely' or 'largely' justified, with only 14% reporting mixed feelings and 9% believing it to be not justified as there are far more important things to look for.

However, less than half (44%) of respondents said academic performance was a very reliable indicator of intellectual ability and of identifying individuals who will make excellent professional lawyers. The highest proportion (46%) said academic performance was 'OK but should be used in context', while a further 11% said it was not reliable.

Wragge & Co senior partner Quentin Poole (pictured) says: "Law is not actually as closed a club as people think, but it is true that there are too many middle-aged white men. The will is there but it could take almost a generation to transform the whole face of law, from the time it takes between passing your GCSEs and making partner. It takes time, but we're not lacking in commitment."

• 78% think current diversity initiatives are 'poor' or 'could be better'
• 71% only rarely or never encounter a lawyer from a working class background in commercial law
• 66% believe law it too elitist a career
• 65% believe it to be important for the legal profession to promote and improve social diversity
• 44% believe academic performance is a reliable indicator of intellectual ability for commercial law

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PRIME – all together now

In September last year 23 UK and Irish law firms came together to launch a groundbreaking initiative intended to boost social mobility in law through a new work experience scheme.

The project – known as PRIME – was spearheaded by Allen & Overy (A&O) senior partner David Morley (pictured) and resulted from initial discussions with firms including Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Clifford Chance, Linklaters, Slaughter and May, Hogan Lovells, Herbert Smith and Norton Rose.

In little more than six months since its launch, PRIME has tripled its membership to more than 75 law firms, with Simmons & Simmons, Latham & Watkins, Mayer Brown, Olswang, Reed Smith, Weil Gotshal & Manges, White & Case, Weightmans and Taylor Wessing among the firms signing up in recent months. The vast majority of the largest 50 UK law firms are now in the scheme, with the co-operation itself representing something of a breakthrough for a competitive profession.

The goal was that the group would provide at least 2,500 work experience places annually by 2015. Those joining have committed to providing work experience places to state school children from disadvantaged backgrounds, with the number of positions being offered required to equal at least half of each firm's annual trainee intake.

Firms are now in the process of drawing up their own individual plans for meeting these targets, with each child (aged between 14 and 18) required to receive at least 30-35 hours of work experience. While firms are free to design their own programmes, the commitment to hitting core elements of the PRIME framework is externally monitored by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER). The NFER is also overseeing the wider progress of the scheme (ironically, monitoring costs is one of the heaviest expenses for participating firms).

Those eligible for the scheme must be either of the first generation of their family to go to university or come from a family below the income threshold for free school meals.

The objective is to get those involved to view a career within the legal sector – whether as a lawyer or in some kind of support role – as a realistic prospect.

Comments Morley: "Our focus is work experience. It's one of the best ways to help a wider range of people understand what a career might look like and aspire to that, whether in law or something else."

For A&O, the firm's obligations to PRIME are met through its existing Smart Start programme which, in its fourth year, gives more than 100 16 and 17-year-olds annually from poor London boroughs a one-week insight into the firm's business. One former student was prompted to retake his AS-levels and went on to win a scholarship from Herbert Smith to attend university, while A&O is soon set to see its first university vacation scheme student from the programme.

"You see kids who come from a tough background and wouldn't typically even come into an office like ours," says Morley. "But the programme changes their mind and makes them realise it is a possibility. It hasn't been set up as a talent scouting model but we're pleased if it comes out that way."

In contrast, Linklaters' involvement in PRIME has led the firm to overhaul its existing work experience opportunities with a view to also seeking out those who could go on to become lawyers. The firm is teaming up with The College of Law to deliver a new one-week programme to 30 sixth form students who meet the PRIME criteria but in addition are all predicted to get at least ABB at A-level.

The programme, which will run in addition to a separate work experience for school age children of all abilities, saw the firm identify participants with the help of the Social Mobility Foundation and Pathways to Law.

Other initiatives already announced by firms include a move by Slaughters to team up with Central Foundation Boys' School in Islington to help get students into top universities. The Key project, run by the Access Project, sees Slaughters commit to three years of funding from this year, offering places for 40 students in the first year, with the intention of increasing this to at least 80 places by 2013.

• For more, see Pegasus – slaying the Bar's beast of a diversity problem