The Global 100 debate: Going hard and betting long

Nathalie Tidman, Legal Business: How have your businesses been performing over the last year? What have been the highlights?

Deborah Finkler, Slaughter and May: Remarkably well. I certainly think that we have all been holding our breath for the last two years for the downturn, which still has not entirely happened. The biggest issue we are facing is that we have a higher headcount than we had 18 months ago. You normally wait until things get difficult and then you think about how you are going to cope, but things are not difficult enough. One of the issues I have as a managing partner is persuading people that we need to be out pounding the pavements and getting more work, given that we never make people redundant.

Richard Youle, Skadden: Business is decent. I do not think it is amazing. We have a similar dynamic, which is that we have more lawyers than we have ever had and not as much work. If you compare things to 2021, which law firm management seems to do, then we are obviously quieter with a higher headcount. Also, there is no or very little attrition in the business. The average is about 15% and we are at about 3%. All the work we get, we can staff without panic. You need a bit of panic in the system if you are going to hit the profitability levels that we would like to. All business types that we have are busy. Our controversy business is very busy, which is the hedge that a lot of firms have.

Deborah Finkler: I have never heard it called controversy. I love that.

David Avery-Gee, Weil: Volumes in M&A and private equity are obviously considerably lower this year and that affects us because we are quite transactional, but we have a very strong restructuring business, and that provides a bit of a buffer and is counter-cyclical. Yes, it is not like it was a couple of years ago, but it is fine. Certain sectors are extremely busy. In M&A, Pharma is very busy. Mining is quite busy as well. We are busy in certain areas.

Aedamar Comiskey, Linklaters: Things have held up better than you would expect with everything that is going on in the world. In some ways, it is surprising how much stuff is still going on, given what you pick up every time you read the news. You just have to be constantly prepared to flex because it is a pretty unusual macroeconomic environment, and it is not getting any more certain.

Mark Sansom, Freshfields: Despite the headwinds over the last couple of years and the fact that it has been challenging in the capital markets and so on, business has been remarkably robust. The London market has gone through a period of quite sustained growth in many areas. The optimist in me thinks that, if that has been the position throughout those challenging macroeconomic circumstances, then as we start to get green shoots across the areas that have been somewhat constrained and facing challenges over the last couple of years, we could be on the cusp of a period of very high growth in London.

Jonathan Field, SSQ: It has been pretty remarkable how robust the business has been in terms of lateral hiring. Our job is to speak to managing partners day in and day out, and if you just take a broad view of what they are reporting, a large number of law firms are talking about having an up year this year. If you had said that to us at the beginning of the year, we would never have believed that.

There are two or three places that every law firm in the world thinks it can make money. Law firms are very focused on finding talent in both London and New York. You are right that associate attrition has been low. Our business from 2021 is probably down 30% or 40% in terms of the liquidity of moving associates, but the partner stuff has remained flat. If not, it has gone up a little bit.

You will all have seen what has gone on in London over the last year. If a law firm is convinced that it is finding a partner that can be additive, it is going long and betting hard on London in particular. The Middle East has also been a huge growth business for us. Asia has been very challenging. I would say that, broadly, New York and London are the huge commitment, everyone is trying to find opportunities in the Middle East, and no-one really knows what to do with Asia.

Jean-Pierre Douglas-Henry, DLA Piper: I am interested in your comment about associate churn. You are not seeing them coming through the recruitment cycle, but we are seeing associate attrition. They are leaving to do other things. Gen Z does not want to go the partnership route. Carrot and stick does not work. They want to do a few years and then go off and try something else.

Charles Brasted, Hogan Lovells: The competition from in-house opportunities has grown enormously. That is where we are seeing people going. The opportunity to have more of a business-led, in-house career is much more attractive now than it was five or ten years ago. We do not necessarily see that as a bad thing. If we can send associates off into the world who are going to be the clients of next year or five years’ time or ten years’ time, that is not a bad thing as long as we are giving them a good experience and they leave in a good way. That is probably a new priority. It is about making sure that people who want to be with us for three to seven years and then move on do so really positively.

Deborah Finkler: There is a huge issue with the fact that our associate salaries are so high. It is very hard for people to move in-house.

Edward Poulton, Baker McKenzie: For some of our teams, a lot of attrition over the past 20 years has been to clients, who have been expanding their in-house teams very significantly, particularly in the tech sector. However, a number of these corporates have not been growing, and some have in fact been reducing their numbers, over the past year or so. This has definitely affected the natural level of attrition, particularly to clients or corporates in the tech sector.

‘There is a huge issue with the fact that our associate salaries are so high. It is very hard for people to move in-house.’
Deborah Finkler, Slaughter and May

Kate Downey, Fried Frank: We have seen a reduction in people moving in-house for precisely that reason. Typically, our associates would have gone either to start-up businesses that maybe are just going to sit tight and wait a while, or they would have gone to large asset managers or big banks, who are cutting costs themselves and cannot match the salaries even to anything close to what associates would have been receiving. We are seeing more of an uptick in business because some of our largest clients have had to lay off on their side, and they are looking to lean more heavily on us than they would have done historically.

Nathalie Tidman: You might have been forgiven for thinking that opportunities have dried up for US firms in the London market. We have seen Cravath opening an English law practice in London and we have seen Paul Weiss doing the same. How much scope do you think there is for more growth?

Oliver Brettle, White & Case: Referring to the recent high-level PE moves, I would say that we have not grown to 140 partners in London for the pleasure of London’s transport system. We have grown in London because it is a very profitable market. London has always existed as a disproportionately large market for law firms because of the global reach of London. That continues, and English law continues. Therefore, if you are going to be a player in the global legal market, you are going to have to have a substantial office or presence in the second-largest legal centre.

It is obvious that law firms see London as a very good place to continue to build business. Frankly, that is a positive vote in favour of London. I am exposing my prejudices here, but if you had gone back to the dreadful Brexit vote day, a lot of people would have predicted even years later substantial investments like this would not be made. I think a lot of people would have said we would have been licking our wounds still, and people would have been very worried about London’s place in the global business environment. Fortunately, that has not come to pass for the legal industry.

David Avery-Gee: It appears to be very focused on private equity and leveraged finance and things around financial sponsors. It is not necessarily a vote of confidence in the whole London market, but I thought it was good news that they were prepared to make that investment in that particular sector.

Rich Youle: The two firms you have picked out are very uninvested in London. They have been dipping their toe in and they needed to do something. I was not surprised by what Paul Weiss did. I was more surprised by what Cravath did, although it was obviously less impactful, just because of the type of firm that it is.

Deborah Finkler: Cravath is a very huge player, but I am not sure the Paul Weiss thing is entirely about private equity. I think that there is a serious prospect that Paul Weiss is going to go further than that.

Nathalie Tidman: The indications seem to be that Paul Weiss wants to go full-service.

Rich Youle: US firms in London tend to be smaller mirror images of what those firms are strong at in the US. That is certainly one of the first things we think about when we are thinking about growing. Do we have a great practice in the US that we cannot cover in Europe or in London specifically?

Deborah Finkler: Paul Weiss is either going to do it or it is not, but the amount of money it has spent suggests that it is going to give it a go.

Jonathan Field: Paul Weiss is clearly ramping up to try to do things in a bunch of products, although not in every product. A few things have dawned on US firms in particular over the last few years.

There are four or five businesses that have become so profitable on a stand-alone basis in London. That was not always the case. For a long time, some of these firms were here because it was just a defensive play. The white-shoe firms now know they can make serious money. I am talking about serious white-shoe New York firms whose most profitable office is in London. These guys pay attention to that. Now that they have the evidence that you can scale a business and stack up with New York on a profit-per-lawyer and profit-per-partner basis, they will go for it.

So much is driven by private capital, and the amount of work some of these firms were referring into London became substantial. If you think about the work that some of these firms have been referring to Magic Circle firms, particularly in private equity, M&A, antitrust and restructuring, there does come a tipping point where it makes sense for them to jump in.

I would add Sullivan & Cromwell to that list of firms investing in London in a way they have not done before.

Look at how many of these firms are now, to all intents and purposes, full service in so far as private capital is concerned. They will do private equity, antitrust, regulatory, tax, litigation and fundraisings. They are doing pretty much everything now, and that is also a new development. The amount of US firms that can credibly offer clients total full-service offering in London is in a totally different place from what it was five years ago. They have grabbed a market share and that has provoked everyone to jump in.

Stephen Millar, CMS: It is interesting what you describe as full service though. You mentioned about six areas of the law, when there are about 66 areas.

Jonathan Field: The way they view it is, ‘Do we have the areas that mean that we are not going to lose out on big-ticket M&A and private equity?’

Stephen Millar: That is a very particular set of clients. That is an important and valuable subset of London, but London is so much more than that.

Jonathan Field: Agreed, but I will give you another example that goes beyond private equity. Two years ago, if we had sat at this table and someone had said there would be a real push by the US firms around infrastructure, I am not sure everyone would have bought that, but there has been really significant investment to grab market share in infrastructure. That was a product that was effectively done exclusively by UK law firms five years ago, but not anymore. I agree that there are loads of other areas, but it is creeping. There are certain products now in London that are almost exclusively dominated by US firms. ‘Magic Circle’ is almost a weird phrase these days.

Stephen Millar: My sense is that there are two markets. The market you are speaking about in the funds and everything is essentially US capital, and US capital in London.

We have a lot of big, high-value, UK-headquartered firms almost fighting two enemies. They are two completely different battles, and you simply cannot be both, which serves us extremely well.

Nathalie Tidman: Moving on to consolidation, what does everyone think about the rationale of A&O Shearman and what it means for the market? Is it a good move or a bad move?

Aedamar Comiskey: I have a huge amount of respect for Wim Dejonghe at A&O. He is a strategic guy. He clearly had a very clear plan for what he wanted to do, so I am sure it makes a lot of sense for what A&O wanted to do, and I guess it made plenty of sense for Shearman as well. Smart people have a good strategy. It may not be everybody’s strategy, but for them I am sure they had a good plan.

Stephen Millar: Any examples of consolidation are good. It makes it an option again after years of probably all of us doing extremely well and consolidation not really being in contemplation. I think it is great for that reason. Then whether it is a good idea or not will all be in the execution.

Adam Brown, SSQ: The A&O management set out a very clear strategy to their partners and said, ‘We are going to double the size of our US business in five years’ time,’ and they have done it in one fell swoop. Is it a distressed acquisition? Whatever it is, they have executed on what they said they were going to do. It will be interesting in five years’ time, looking at the US market, to see who is still there and what is achieved, but I think it is a good move, absolutely.

‘People begin to get back into the habit and they get used to being in the office again.’
Kate Downey, Fried Frank

Ted Greeno, Quinn Emanuel: It is a defensive move, is it not? The US firms we were talking about are building their capacity and their business in London, which they can do because they have a very strong corporate client base in the US which pays big fees. To defend against that, you have to do the same over in the US. A&O were the first firm to go in with a credible US presence to see if they can do that, but it is all going to be in the execution.

Deborah Finkler: Who around this table would want to manage that merger over the next five years? A&O and Shearman will deliver the deal, but it is going to be unmanageable.

Ted Greeno: I think it will be about 15 years before we know whether it is successful or not. It is not necessarily great for the partners of today. It might be good for the partners of tomorrow.

Mark Sansom: There is certainly a part of the market where you are getting this trend towards greater and greater scale. To the extent that that is the direction of travel for the legal services market more generally, maybe things like this accelerate that trend a little bit, because everyone else looks at it and reassesses where they are at on their own scale, whether they are growing organically or through mergers like this. That is one of the ways I can see it having an impact.

Edward Poulton: We have been talking about how people are really focused on the two key markets of New York and London. When you take a step back and you think about the ways of growing in New York if you are a London firm, or in London for a New York-based firm, bringing together a London-centric and a New York-centric firm seems like a pretty logical thing to do. But it is very bold, and many of us are looking on and waiting to see how it pans out in the execution.

Nathalie Tidman: Is further consolidation something there is space for? Can you see it happening in terms of more firms, irrespective of A&O Shearman, going into merger talks or seeing what is on the table?

Ted Greeno: The question is: which US firms? A lot of them who want a presence in London are doing it by starting here, getting their chequebooks out and building up the partners rather than by a merger, but it is much more difficult for London firms to go and do it in the US in that way. Who are the firms you merge with that are at the right level? Shearman was perhaps unique.

Jonathan Field: Over the years, we have done some introducing of firms, and the conversion rate is about 0.0001%. The A&O Shearman thing was an anomaly. Forget the profitability point, which is very hard now. There is such a delta on profitability between US and UK firms, but governance, titles, ego and all those things basically make most of these things impossible.

‘There is a correlation between people who spend more days in the office and appraisal ratings.’
Mark Sansom, Freshfields

The reason the A&O Shearman thing worked is that A&O happened to find Shearman at a point where it had to do something. From A&O’s point of view, it has an acquisition where it did not really have to compromise on most of the things you usually have to compromise on, and yet the firm got 200 partners in the US.

It is going to be difficult to integrate but if your pitch to clients is, ‘We can do all your best cross-border work and the most sophisticated work across the world, and we can do that in the US and in London,’ A&O has a credible story in terms of critical mass.

It is not just mergers that get you there. Freshfields has done a great job in the US. Three or four years ago, if you had pointed to what Freshfields has achieved, I am not sure everyone would have said that it would have been able to do what it has done. You have to break some eggs among your partnership to get there, and you have to just concede that they are two different markets. I would be shocked if there were any more mergers on this scale.

Nathalie Tidman: Few firms seem to have completely nailed hybrid working. Obviously, lots of clients are mandating four days a week in the office, and there seems to be a shift in terms of law firms following that and mandating. What are your thoughts on that?

Rich Youle: Skadden has mandated four days a week. We led the decision on that and we have followed the clients and not the market on this topic.

Our firm’s central management made this decision. The challenge that Eric Friedman, Skadden’s executive partner, took on was partners not coming back to the office. The partners now have to do four days in the office. That was about getting the leaders of the business back around the corridor. How can you expect associates and counsel and the like to be in the office if the leaders of the business are not in the office?

Then the associates doing four days in the office was always going to follow. My team was not over the moon about it; neither though were they up in arms about it. If someone put you in the average Skadden associate position, they are high earners. It is a great firm brand. They have amazing opportunities and experience to gain. Benefits and all the rest of it are amazing. If you do four days a week and contrast it with the fellows laying my patio at my house, who are aged 60, humping bricks around, earning £20,000 a year and doing six days, I do not think that you can have any complaint here. I would say, ‘This is what we are going to do, so if you do not want to do that and there is a better opportunity for you at another firm, then go for it.’ We think the advantages of being in the office far outweigh those working from home.

Kate Downey: Long before we put in place the formal processes, we had informally started saying to the team, ‘These three days,’ because you need to have everybody together to create something. It worked fine when everyone was out because we were all in the same situation. Everyone is the same height on Zoom, but if you have half in half out, it is very difficult. Long before we were into discussions about what we are mandating and how we are responding to the client feedback, it was easier to just group everybody together into a fixed number of days. Honestly, it has not been that challenging. If it is led from the top and you have associates understanding that that is beneficial, it becomes self-perpetuating quite quickly. People begin to get back into the habit and they get used to it again. As long as you are still offering them some degree of flexibility around the margins, it has not been that much of a struggle, at least in London.

Aedamar Comiskey: It is all about the softer benefits. You cannot keep a strong culture and you cannot have people enjoying work nearly as much in the long-term if they are working on their own. Really, where is the fun?

Kate Downey: During lockdown, I have never felt so much like a six-year associate! When you are in lockdown and all you have is a screen and people giving you a pile of paper on the left-hand side to look at and a pile of paper on the right-hand side to look at, it is no way to live. It is not why you do this. It’s so much nicer to be back in the office.

Jean-Pierre Douglas-Henry: We started off by mandating and we got such backlash and such geographical variations. In Germany, it is five days a week. In Scandinavia they almost never come in unless there is a party on. In Australia, it depends on what the weather is doing. The minute you start trying to force it, you get trouble in return. If you just let it go with a degree of reasonableness, our productivity levels are up; they are not down. There is also a generational point about this. The younger generation is much more used to learning online than we are.

Aedamar Comiskey: One of the challenges is that if people joined law firms during Covid, they do not know what it was like before. When I would say, ‘It was a bit more fun when you were working late and you could sit around and have a laugh about something,’ that does not relate to them.

Jonathan Field: We have seen that law firms also have a renewed confidence in being able to say to people, ‘If you don’t like it, go.’ A year ago, they just did not have the confidence to do that. There are associates who have not seen clients face-to-face and have not been sat in the office. The skills gap is huge.

Jeremy Mead, SSQ: When speaking to associates 18 months to two years ago, flexible working was a big part of their agenda. It was really important to them, and a lot of associates were saying, ‘If my firm shifts at all, I will just go, because I like this too much.’ That is far less part of the conversation now. There is just an acceptance that things are going back to what was previously the norm.

Mark Sansom: There is a correlation between people who spend more days in the office and appraisal ratings. The question is: is that causal or is it just that people who are ambitious and high performing tend to like to be around the office more because they get something from that? I am inclined to think it is probably a bit of both, but in large part the latter. The question is: how do you respond to it? I am sure in everyone’s firms it is an active and ongoing debate. For my part, I am inclined to favour encouragement more than mandating, but I recognise that it feels like there is something in the air at the moment. Things are shifting bit by bit.

Deborah Finkler: There have been various studies done about the fact that if you say you have all of this flexibility, then ambitious men in particular will come in because they work out that they need to be there for the key points in the transaction or the piece of litigation, and the women take you at face value. It is going to be even more difficult on the social mobility issue. It seems to me that, in some ways, if we are trying to be more diverse, we have to be much more directional about it and we have to say, ‘No. Actually, for your career, you need to be in the office four days a week because that is how you build up your social capital. I know you think it is better for you to be able to be flexible, but actually, to tell you the truth, it just isn’t.’

Aedamar Comiskey: It is a bit of cause and effect as well. People think, ‘Actually, this is better fun than I thought’ or ‘I am actually enjoying this’ or ‘I am learning far more because I can run in next door and just ask somebody quickly instead of having to work out who I’m going to ring.’ Smart people see a benefit and then do more of it. I too am more on the encouragement end because I have faith that people will see benefits, and it is much better if they see the benefits than you telling them there is a benefit.

Charles Brasted: If all you tell people is, ‘You just have to come in,’ you tell people, ‘You do not need to think about it. You do not need to think about why you are coming in,’ whereas if you say to people, ‘Come in as much as is going to work for you and your colleagues this week, and talk about that,’ then people behave like grown-ups.

Kate Downey: From a management perspective, if you are going to mandate it, you have to stand behind it. I am not 100% convinced that that will play out in reality, because that would suggest that you are going to treat a high performer and an average performer the same way if they did not comply. There are a whole bunch of issues around what that means and how you really enforce it, and I do not think that people run their teams like that in reality.

Deborah Finkler: There are huge issues with social mobility, for example. If our kids were saying, ‘They don’t really mind how often I come into the office,’ we would all be saying, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course they do,’ but if you are somebody who does not have that kind of background, then you take it all at face value. We have to be really mindful of that.

There is another thing that we noticed. At the moment, we are three days a week and people come in three days a week. They come in at 9.30 or 10.00, which is absolutely fine. Worryingly, they leave at five o’clock and then they log on. There are then massive issues with people’s mental health, and of course there are, because instead of working until you are finished and then going home and having a life, the junior associates in particular are going home and sitting in small flats with their mates who are not lawyers who are saying to them, ‘Why are you logging on at 19.30? You’re being exploited. This is really terrible.’ There is nobody saying to them, ‘Actually, this is how it should work.’

What they are losing is the whole, ‘We have to stay there until ten o’clock, but we all go together to the staff restaurant and we all have dinner together.’ It sounds very patronising to say to them, ‘You think it’s better for you to go home at five o’clock, but it really isn’t.’

Nathalie Tidman: Slaughters has released some quite ambitious social mobility targets. It is one of those topics that comes and goes. How much impetus is there really behind fixing the problem?

Aedamar Comiskey: If you are looking for talent, you need to be as open-minded as you can about the many places in which you can find it. Social mobility is just as important as a business imperative as it is as a good thing for the community. Honestly, it is probably very high up on many firms’ agendas, both because it is a good thing to do but also because it is good for business. Think about the world we live in. The best client people are those who can relate to many people and find creative solutions. Groupthink is the most dangerous thing for all of us.

Kate Downey: It is also what our clients are demanding of us, and they are not asking nicely. From that point of view, and being slightly cynical about it for a minute also, the biggest driver is that, if we are not able to respond to that as law firms, our clients will not instruct us.

Mark Sansom: It is massively important and has not been focused on enough for far too long. We are now moving very rapidly and rightly into a world of social mobility pay gap reporting in the same way that we report around other metrics. It is a good thing too because, as an industry, we still have big strides to make in that area.

Nathalie Tidman: Firms have been going to the freshers’ fairs of universities that are not Oxford or Cambridge for years. It hasn’t worked. What could move the dial?

Mark Sansom: Reporting is significant. You hold yourself to account and you put some targets out there and you make them public. Then you have to make it happen. Excuses do not work once you are in that situation. Underlying that there is a whole bunch of concrete things that you can do that will improve accessibility to the profession, make the recruitment process more blind to people’s backgrounds and remove the unconscious bias. One of the big things is just being public with some genuinely challenging stretch metrics. That is what focuses minds.

Aedamar Comiskey: It is also about making sure that you do what you say you are going to do. Role model it. Having leaders who are socially mobile is always helpful because people like to join a firm where they think, ‘Okay, there are people here who I can relate to.’

Deborah Finkler: It is quite difficult, because of course everybody under the age of 30 would look at all of us and say we are all posh. They have no idea what our backgrounds are.

Aedamar Comiskey: Nobody would say I am posh.

Nathalie Tidman: Yes, they would.

‘Good lawyers need to be bright, but the ones who really succeed are the ones who can build relationships, think a little bit outside the box and solve problems.’
Aedamar Comiskey, Linklaters

Deborah Finkler: The fact is that they will all make assumptions of us because of the fact that we are who we are. You have to talk a lot about your life stories. One of the reasons why we made a big deal about releasing our social mobility targets and talked to the press about it is because the huge issue is that people from the lower socioeconomic backgrounds just do not think they can be lawyers. They certainly do not think they can be City lawyers. What we need to do is talk about it a lot and get it in the press so that when people Google the names of our law firms, they know that this is something that we want to do, because there is a huge attitude out there that they think we do not want them.

All the studies on blind recruiting show that it does not work. What we want is for the top of the hopper to be wider. In order to get there or to become a trainee at any of our firms, you are still going to have to be as good as anybody else, but there are people who are just not thinking of applying who are clever enough to be City lawyers.

Ted Greeno: Back in the early 1990s, the recruitment partners of the leading City firms used to meet occasionally to discuss good practice. It was around about that time that the ethnic minority lawyers’ groups were being formed and gaining momentum, and they said, ‘You are discriminating in the City in your recruitment of trainee solicitors, because look at how many trainees you have from ethnic minorities.’ So we decided to look into this and invited representatives of these groups to participate and audit all our recruitment processes. We opened it up to our HR people, as did all the firms, and these representatives had a good look at everyone’s recruitment processes. At the end of it, it took about nine months if I recall correctly, they all said, ‘Yes, your systems are not the problem. The problem is that the education system is not producing enough people who are at the right level.’ Social mobility is not a new problem but I like to think that things have improved since then.

Jeremy Mead: Would anybody consider lowering their academic standard? If people are genuinely disadvantaged, their ability to achieve those higher grades is lower. I have looked at thousands of lawyer CVs and there is no diversity in the academic standard of lawyers.

Deborah Finkler: All of our CV sifting is done by partners, but I am sure lots of people around the table use things like Rare Recruitment, or interview people who, without the contextual data, would not meet the academic standards. They still have to show that they are as clever as anybody else.

Ted Greeno: When I became a recruitment partner, I got someone to go back seven years, looking at the statistics on who we kept on at the end of their two years. The people with the worst academic results were more likely to be kept on than the people with firsts.

Aedamar Comiskey: The thing that many of the law firms do now, which is sensible, is to look at what people have achieved relative to the school that they come from. If they have achieved much higher, then you would think, ‘OK, this person is probably going to be pretty good.’ Good lawyers need to be bright, but the ones who really succeed are the ones who can build relationships, think a little bit outside the box and solve problems.

Jonathan Field: If diversity among the partnership is going to impact social mobility, law firms actually deserve a lot of credit. Just watch when law firms appoint people into leadership positions now. Sometimes now when clients of ours are choosing between the partner with the biggest book of business or a diverse candidate, they will go for a diverse candidate. This is all making small changes.

By the way Deborah, you are the first person to describe Richard Youle as posh. I want that in Legal Business.

Oliver Brettle: One thing we should realise is that the universities, albeit very late and very recently, are making a lot more of an effort to broaden their funnel for talent.

I believe that the bigger issue now lies before university. There is a piece of work to be done about how we in the City firms reach the schools to encourage people in the schools to say that law is for them.

Charles Brasted: One of the unexpected advantages of Covid that we found was on that reaching out more nationally. By being forced to do everything online, it stopped being, ‘Yes, if you are in Oxford or Cambridge or you are at school in Guildford, it is easy.’ It became much more accessible, and so we have learned a lesson from that in terms of doing more of that stuff online. It is not perfect, but it is a bit of levelling. The real issue is retention and promotion.

Deborah Finkler: It may turn out to be a blip, in which case we are utterly buggered, but we found that once they were through our door, the people from a lower socioeconomic background had identical prospects of staying on and becoming a partner.

Charles Brasted: We applauded ourselves just now for all of these people who are diverse being visibly appointed to leadership roles. That is pretty double-edged because, in most law firms, doing the leadership job is not the best way of being remunerated. We often give people who are visibly diverse lots of visible leadership roles, but in some ways we are making their career path and their success more difficult. We need to be careful about that.

Kate Downey: It has been fascinating watching that in the context of gender diversity. The debate has shifted significantly in the last five or ten years. We have not yet seen that really flow through, but we have stopped saying that it is the job of the senior women to fix the women. This is now something that everybody has to get bought in on, and it is about everybody having a role in making that viable, but I agree that we are still not there. It is coming, but it is not there. LB

nathalie.tidman@legalease.co.uk

Photographer: Kris Humphreys

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