When I joined the UK Legal 500 a year ago, one of the main ambitions I set out was to improve diversity in our rankings and, in particular, the proportion of cited women. The reason was obvious – women are under-represented at senior levels in law firms and this has also historically been the case in many of our rankings.
Unconscious bias has long served as a barrier to entry for many talented female lawyers who were in many instances not being put forward for recognition, either by their firms or peers. However, with diversity increasingly on law firms’ agenda it was important for us to play our part by raising the profile of talented female lawyers who may otherwise have gone unmentioned in our research.
