Legal Village

Eighty-five years of progress... but plenty more work to do

Posted 7/12/2007 by Andrew Holroyd

This week I had the great pleasure of attending the Association of Women Solicitors' (AWS) 85th anniversary reception. The reception was all about celebrating the achievements of women and of the AWS in their role in opening doors for so many.

Meeting one solicitor was a particular pleasure - Rosalind Mackworth, who is approaching her 80th birthday but still works three days a week. She is truly remarkable – pure energy and zest personified – and it’s no surprise that her clients aren’t overly enamoured with the prospect of her retiring next year.

Despite all this good work the challenge facing women does, however, continue and what’s most striking is that we are only talking about a minority group at the higher echelons of the profession – women are now a numerical majority across the profession.

That imbalance has got to change and we, for one, are certainly practising what we preach. We have more women than men on our senior management team and both my predecessor as president, Fiona Woolf, and our chief cxecutive's predecessor were women.

Our excellence awards in October highlighted the very best equality and diversity work. But the reality is many firms still have work to do. In my remarks at the AWS reception I joked that it’s great some firms are giving their staff two days a week to work at home – the only problem is that they are Saturday and Sunday. The serious point is that by not doing everything they can to retain the most talented (if, for instance, they are returning from maternity leave) then firms - and the profession as a whole - risk losing out.

With ABSs and other competition on the horizon, recruiting and retaining the best will be even more important than ever before. I hope this business imperative will be a catalyst for change. Those who don’t could lose out on the balance sheet.

This week we have been hosting an international diversity conference, with GC100 firms and practices from across the world. There’s no better learn than through sharing experiences so I’m sure all the firms present will benefit.