Gen Z – including its lawyers – are often characterised as being overly concerned about the social and political issues that come under the ESG umbrella. It’s an issue that was discussed at Legal Business’s April Enterprise GC event in a panel called: ‘The ideal employer for an idealistic lawyer’, during which one audience member dismissed concerns in the somewhat facetious terms: ‘Everybody’s gone woke!’
The truth is – as always – more nuanced. While Gen Z lawyers do care about ESG issues, this does not mean there is a cultural clash between the generations, even if they are more vocal about their expectations than older generations may have been.
‘ESG comes up a lot in the interview process,’ says Ruth Buchanan, employment partner and training principal at Ashurst. ‘Young lawyers have done their research on our firm, and are interested to hear about our work in the projects and energy transition space, as well as what we are doing internally. We also get a lot of questions around what the firm is doing from a diversity and inclusion perspective – that’s clearly really key for candidates now, but it’s not an area I would have thought to ask about as a young lawyer.’
Johnson Matthey assistant GC and EGC ‘idealistic lawyer’ panellist Natalie Hunt agrees: ‘ESG-related things are talked about a lot more. It comes up in conversations, both internally and in interviews.’
‘If I saw a firm that wasn’t mindful of diversity, that wasn’t doing the cultural minimum, it’d be a red flag,’ says one associate. ‘This is low-hanging fruit – why aren’t you doing these things?’ Diversity in particular emerges as a key concern.
Another associate cites an ex-colleague who left their former firm to go in-house because ‘they felt the firm wasn’t diverse enough’, while a former lawyer who left the profession recalls a sense of unease that while their firm ‘wasn’t at all bad for diversity’, it nonetheless ‘did client work for organisations that were quite open about the fact that they held views that were not positive towards members of the LGBTQ+ community’.
These concerns are important to young lawyers. But they are not overriding. The reference to the ‘minimum’ is telling: poor performance on ESG is an issue because it is a sign of being, in the words of one associate, ‘out of step with the market – especially when we’re advising clients who are facing these same issues’. And firms are increasingly proactive on ESG, with a wealth of initiatives on everything from pro bono work to greener office practices and diverse hiring.
Far from there being a divide though, young lawyers’ concerns and those of more senior colleagues are often in tune with each other. ‘Different generations of lawyers care about ESG in different ways,’ says one associate. ‘For younger lawyers it’s more emotional and value-driven. For lawyers at more senior levels, there’s less of that, but it is absolutely a concern, even if just because it matters to the business.’
‘Everyone wants a work-life balance – but young lawyers are better at talking about it.’
Ruth Buchanan, Ashurst
‘Everyone wants the same thing’
Another complaint frequently raised about members of Gen Z is that they are feckless and workshy – unwilling to come into the office and put in the hours needed to progress in their careers.
Rather than bemoan the younger generation’s attitude towards work-life balance, partners and more senior lawyers spoken to for this feature were positive about some of the strengths of younger lawyers, commenting about how they can improve the office for all ages.
‘Our junior lawyers are often very good at voicing things that our more senior lawyers want too,’ says Buchanan. ‘Everyone wants the same thing: everyone wants a work-life balance that allows them to see their family and friends, take care of themselves, and so on. But young lawyers are better at talking about it. And that’s driven a lot of conversations around things like employee wellbeing.’
Simon Edwards, commercial partner at Trowers & Hamlins and another ‘idealistic lawyers’ panellist, recounts being struck by younger lawyers’ attitude to communication: ‘Gen Z has grown up with social media and mobile phones, and that’s meant that they’re used to sharing their views and having their say on things. They’re more willing to speak their minds than I was as a junior lawyer.’
Hunt notes that prospective candidates increasingly bring up flexible working at interview: ‘We get asked, “Do people come into the office, do they have to come into the office, is it flexible?” We don’t get asked outright what hours people are doing, but we do get asked how the days and the week are structured.’
‘I’m not seeing people wanting to come into the office five days a week,’ adds Edwards, ‘but on the other hand there aren’t many who just want to work from home. Most like to do two to three days in the office, because it allows for a good balance.’
Indeed, while Gen Z may bear the brunt of complaints, they point out that it is often more senior lawyers who put a higher premium on time with their families, while many of the younger cohort are eager to benefit from in-person experience.
Jasmin Chiu, a legal adviser at McArthurGlen who was also on the ‘idealistic lawyers’ panel, tells LB: ‘I’ve noticed that many young lawyers are keen to come into the office more than some other colleagues since we’re at a stage where we’re eager to learn and this can be most easily done in person. I’ve noticed there has been more of a desire to work from home from colleagues who have young families and have moved out of the city.’
This desire to get time in the office with senior colleagues is especially pronounced among the generation that was training or newly qualified during Covid. ‘I trained during the pandemic,’ says one former lawyer. ‘I had quite a poor experience. Doing it remotely was very isolating. I don’t feel that I got a particularly good training experience or felt embedded in a team at all.’
The pandemic also had a negative impact on work-life balance. ‘Things were a lot worse during Covid,’ says one associate who was several years into qualification when lockdown started. ‘You were working longer hours as there was no division between office hours and downtime. If someone emailed you on the weekend in normal times, they might think, “Well, maybe they’re out, they’ll get back to me.” But during Covid there was no excuse.’
Lawyers are split on how far this issue has been resolved since the end of the pandemic. One associate notes positive changes: ‘Firms have done things like introduced sabbatical policies and upped maternity and paternity leave. They’ve become increasingly generous on that.’
But others are more critical: ‘The way the work seeps into your personal life is becoming a lot more pervasive,’ says one former lawyer. ‘It’s so easy to not stop working if you’re doing it remotely. And no-one sees it. I almost felt that I didn’t want to raise it because I didn’t want to look like I wasn’t keeping up.’
As with so much else, the issue may turn on the culture and practices of individual firms. The former lawyer continues: ‘I got told off by one of my line managers once for sending something when I was on annual leave. The attitude was, “We’re great at work-life balance, you shouldn’t be working on annual leave – you should have managed your time better.” It was a weird distortion of what work-life balance was. The fact that I was working on annual leave was taken as my fault. It felt that what I was doing was bad for their image. I really didn’t know what to do with that.’
Law is detail oriented, labour intensive and, for those working in City law firms, extremely well-compensated. As a result, work-life balance is a challenge for lawyers of all levels. ‘I find it hard and I know my colleagues find it hard,’ says Hunt. ‘Over the years I’ve learnt how to switch off, because I know that if I don’t, I suffer, my family suffers, and my work suffers. But if this was my first job I don’t know if I’d have the confidence or the awareness to do that.’
As Edwards notes: ‘Junior lawyers take their lead from a firm’s leaders, so it is really important that those leaders are modelling the right behaviours and staying true to the firm’s culture.’ On both presence in the office and time away from work, firms must set the right example.
‘As young lawyers, we do not always have the luxury of choice when applying to firms or companies.’
Jasmin Chiu, McArthurGlen
Being proactive on these issues is a core part of team culture, argues Nick Wong, a partner in Ashurst’s global loans practice who works with early career lawyers at the firm: ‘There’s a school of thought that says, “As long as I get my job done, why do you care where I do it from?” But I don’t subscribe to that. Part of the job is to be here and to be part of a team, interacting with others in a culture where people enjoy working together. If you want that sense of community, you need to build it and work at it.’
‘It becomes self-selecting’
‘There has always been a tier of people for whom earning the most money possible and working as hard as possible has been the sole focus,’ says Wong. ‘Those people still exist. But there’s also a large and growing tier of people who want more of a balance, and that goes hand in hand with the current generation of young lawyers being brave enough to be open about what they want from their careers.’
For all their concerns about ESG and work-life balance, Gen Z lawyers are – at this point – a small and unique sample within commercial law firms or in-house legal teams. By definition, those already working are the ones who are willing to put in the hours and make the compromises that corporate law requires.
Firms increasingly have procedures in place to allow lawyers to refuse to work on a particular matter if they have ethical or other objections. However, no-one interviewed for this article could recall personally encountering or even hearing about a lawyer turning down work. ‘We’ve never had anybody in my time raise an ethical concern over a certain piece of work,’ says Buchanan.
For one associate, this is because ‘people sort themselves by their value alignments at a much earlier stage’. Put simply: ‘If you have serious ethical objections to working for tobacco companies, for example, you are not going to qualify into a firm that has tobacco clients as major clients.’
Wong concurs: ‘We’ve certainly had people decide they don’t want to go into a certain area,’ he says. ‘It becomes self-selecting.’ In addition to preferences over work-life balance, Wong notes that ethical concerns can factor into these decisions: ‘We’ve had instances where, approaching qualification, Muslim trainees have questioned whether working in certain areas of finance involving interest is compatible with their religious beliefs. We’ve had very open discussions with them about that and fully respect those beliefs. As a full-service firm, we have a wealth of other areas that they can qualify into.’
Another associate puts a slightly different spin on it: ‘It’s not just self-selection. The kind of person who cares enough about political issues to have done anything really controversial as a radical student isn’t going to get past a vetting process, even if they wanted to go into corporate law.’
Interviewees also stressed that Gen Z lawyers were not uncompromising. Chiu offers one explanation for this: ‘Ultimately, as a young trainee or lawyer, we do not always have the luxury of choice when applying to firms or companies.’ Such concerns are more likely to play into later career decisions, she argues: ‘Young lawyers put weight on these factors more than older generations when it comes to choosing to remain and progress in a particular firm or company.’
‘Gen Z has grown up with social media and mobiles – they’re more willing to speak their minds than I was as a junior lawyer.’
Simon Edwards, Trowers & Hamlins
Gen Z lawyers are also regarded as more commercial and career-oriented. ‘There has been a generational shift in terms of expectations, and also in terms of how savvy people are in mapping their careers at a very early stage,’ says Buchanan.
Wong concurs: ‘Career progression is important. Young lawyers are very switched on to what they want out of their career. They’re constantly thinking about where they want to be in two, five or ten years.’
Edwards notes that the small size of the Gen Z lawyers cohort and the youth of its members makes generalisation difficult, but makes a similar point: ‘People are more willing to move, whether that’s to a competitor firm, to go in-house, or even to get more experience in the business outside of the law.’
‘Younger lawyers aren’t going to stick in something that’s not right for them,’ he continues. ‘They say, “If I don’t like the culture or what the firm is doing on ESG, I’ll move on.” Employers need to make sure they’re providing an environment in which people want to stay. It’s not enough to just have the carrot of the money. You need to provide a rounded experience if you want to keep people.’
Partners are alive to these issues, and firms are increasingly considering them when it comes to working with and mentoring their young lawyers.
But what may be most interesting is to see what changes as the number of Gen Z lawyers grows and as members of the cohort become more senior. Hunt ends on a note of cautious optimism: ‘Yes, this profession might be one with sometimes slightly insane hours, lots of stress, et cetera, but I do think (and hope) it’s improving, especially in terms of the respect for people’s mental health within the profession. I feel that over the next five, ten, fifteen years ,the legal profession, in particular private practice, will need to change. I just don’t think it’s sustainable.’ LB