RollOnFriday founder Matthew Rhodes argues it is education – not an increasingly meritocratic profession – that is to blame for lack of social mobility in law.
Earlier this year Westminster School offered a mini-pupillage at a barrister’s chambers as a lot in a charity auction. The story hit the national press – The Guardian fumed: ‘Fancy a career in the law? A mini-pupillage with a criminal barrister can be Freddie’s for offers over £650.’ The Social Mobility Foundation complained, the Bar Standards Board felt obliged to investigate. All hell broke loose, over a week’s work experience for a teenager.
A bit of an overreaction? Given the kicking the profession is currently getting for not providing sufficiently broad access, perhaps it’s an understandable one.
I declare an interest: I went to Westminster. A few weeks before this story broke I attended a dinner for lawyers who had been at the school. The 80-odd guests that turned up included five High Court judges, the Attorney General and the President of the Supreme Court. From just one school. Alan Milburn, whose 2012 ‘Fair Access to Professional Careers’ report castigated the profession for not doing enough to encourage social diversity, would have had a seizure.
Is Milburn right in claiming that children from the most privileged backgrounds have a clear advantage in getting into the professions? It would be naïve to suggest otherwise. They tend to have ambitious parents who throw time, money and attention at their education. As a result, they’re fairly likely to leave school with a string of A* grades and a place at one of the older universities. Strong academics, an Oxbridge degree, confidence at interview after years of practice: these are all things which go down well with employers. But it’s pretty cheap to lay the blame for this at the door of law firms.
Most firms – at least the successful ones – are absolute meritocracies. They survive on recruiting the best talent, whatever its background, and go to great lengths to do this. Slaughter and May, the most profitable (and traditional) firm in the City, is staffed by lawyers drawn from over 50 universities. Twenty-seven per cent of its trainee intake is non-white. More than 20 major law firms have signed up to Prime, an initiative to get school kids from poor backgrounds into work experience. Even Milburn gives it his blessing. And I’d bet that Bridgepoint, the Mayfair-based private equity house which retains him as a consultant, doesn’t make anything like the same efforts.
There is, of course, always the exception that proves the rule. In 2009, two trainees from Farrer & Co went to Bristol University law fair and graded the students in an internal document. Those who knew about Titian, were interested in sport or were ‘very sweet’ or ‘soft spoken’ should be called for interview. Those who were of ‘Afro-Caribbean’ or ‘Middle Eastern’ origin should not. But Farrers is an anomaly – a firm where lawyers still wear brown suits on Fridays and believe that the ability to call clients ‘my lord’ compensates for earning less than their peers. And even they had the grace to be embarrassed when this story broke.
For everyone else, this isn’t about a failure to embrace diversity. If anything, it’s largely about resources. We’re in a prolonged downturn where graduate recruitment has been cut across the board. Yet law schools continue to offer expensive places to students with poor grades and poorer prospects, pumping ever increasing numbers of wannabe lawyers into a market that can’t support them. Thousands of candidates flock to City firms every year. Under-resourced, busy grad rec officers increasingly have to rely on candidates being able to tick the boxes. The confident kid with strong academics and a degree from Cambridge is going to be an easier choice than the nervous one with poor grades. Even if it turns out to be a worse choice in the long run. I certainly was for my old shop, Ashurst, when I repaid the firm’s considerable investment in training me by leaving at 2PQE to set up an orange website.
Firms make huge efforts to be diverse, but they are commercial rather than charitable organisations and with the best will in the world there is only so much that can reasonably be expected of them. The shortage of graduates from deprived backgrounds entering the law has nothing to do with Milburn’s fantasy of partners throughout the City recruiting sound chaps who went to their alma mater. It has far more to do with his government allowing universities to charge £27,000 for degrees that were previously free. He accuses the profession of ‘social engineering on a grand scale’. He is wrong.
The author is the founder of RollOnFriday.