SWEEPING CHANGE

SW E E PING A SEC T OR IN THEM I DST OF CHANGE

SPOTLIGHT ON SUSAN BRIGHT AND HOGAN LOVELLS

SUSAN BRIGHT IS UK MANAGING PARTNER AND GLOBAL MANAGING PARTNER ORGANISATION IS HELPING TO RAISE ASPIRATIONS IN SCHOOLS. FOR DIVERSITY, INCLUSION AND RESPONSIBLE BUSINESS AT HOGAN LOVELLS, ONE OF THE WORLD’S BIGGEST LAW FIRMS. HERE SHE DISCUSSES HOW THE

Q// Tell us a little bit about your approach to social mobility.

A// We’ve always been very keen for the profession to be very open. Law has a bit of a reputation about people not really knowing or understanding [it]. So it’s about demystifying it for people who have maybe never met a lawyer and would have no clue as to what it is. At the end of the day, law is about helping people with your toolkit of law to solve a problem or to get an outcome. In terms of outreach, we’ve done a lot of work in that area, both in London, but also in some cold spots around the country. We go in, talk about law in a very accessible way and give children the opportunity just to understand what that’s like. In the sixth form, we often bring the children into the office to get a feel for it, and I think that’s really important. It’s about giving people aspiration. A lot of kids have never walked into an office building like that, and it’s a quite frightening thing to do. So we’re bringing people in, taking them to the canteen sitting around and having a meal together and talking about it, and they’re inspirational. They’ve got such views on everything, it’s extraordinary. So we do a lot of work in that space through different programmes, and we partner with other people. There are some really great organisations - like the Sutton Trust, Aspiring Solicitors and Rare Recruitment – and we work collaboratively with them all, going into schools and giving young people the opportunity to join a training programme with us [or] mentoring them and so on. Then people join us and [it’s about] making a place where people want to stay and grow and feel really included. I’d like to think that Hogan Lovells is a very open and inclusive place and we do a lot of work [on that]. We realised in about 2010 that the proportion of black and ethnic minority people we had joining us as trainees was about nine per cent, so not enough. We did a lot of work thinking about how do we widen access to more universities and really to make this a place that people want to join. The team worked incredibly hard at getting out there and talking to people and we increased the proportion to 30 per cent. It took five years by 2015, but I’m pleased to say it’s stayed above 30 per cent every year since. Then you have to turn your attention to say, ‘we’ve got these great people from real diverse backgrounds, from different racial backgrounds all joining us, [but] how do we make it a place where people really, really want to stay?’ You have to hold a mirror up to your own organisation.

Q// There are wider changes happening in law in terms of how you qualify to become a solicitor. How do you think that might change the opportunities for having a really diverse profession?

DETERMINATON , RESILIENCE AND YOU’ VE GOT PEOPLE WITH REAL GRIT, DRIVE TO BE SUCCESSFUL

A// There are changes coming up to the solicitors’ qualification examinations. The aim behind them is to widen access and to make it more accessible. I hope very much that they have that impact. I’m not personally sure that simply changing an exam [is a] silver bullet. I think it’s really important that you maintain the quality. People want to go to lawyers who really know what they’re doing. That benchmark is really important. So I think there’s no one silver bullet, but it’s a combination of things. I do think that we are making progress in terms of widening access. About five years ago, we introduced what we call contextual recruitment. It flags up to us people who are applying from a challenged background. For example, their results may not look so spectacular, but compared to the school they’re at, they are really very good. It gives us the opportunity to interview a broader range of people. We’ve had people come through now who’ve been flagged up in that way, and boy are they good. That’s what’s so interesting. You’ve got people who’ve got real grit, determination, resilience and drive to be successful. That’s fantastic for us and I hope fantastic for them, too.

Q//How far on the journey do you feel the legal sector is and what are the challenges ahead in terms of opening up the sector?

A// There has been a lot that’s done. PRIME was set up a long time ago amongst law firms in order to give a much wider range of young people the opportunity to do work experience, which is so important. Collaboration like that is critical. What do we do going forward? Well, I think the challenge, we’ve got is this immediate challenge of being in a virtual world. One of the things that PRIME has done, is create an app to connect students who are still at university with young people who are, for example, in law, to do mentoring at a time when the usual ways of connecting people are different. How far along are we? I think we’ve done a lot, but we’ve got so much more to do as a profession to keep doing it. I think it’s about being on it all the time. It’s not always about coming up with something new, it’s about putting in place opportunities to go out into schools, talk to kids, give them the opportunity to come in, to talk to people about what it’s really like. We just have to just keep at it all of the time,

Q// Of course, nobody can do it all on their own and it is this tapestry of all the law firms making their contribution to it that ultimately will achieve bigger change in the longer term but you’re not going to fix it overnight. It is quite generational in nature, isn’t it?

A// You’re absolutely right. It was 1989 when I joined our firm and we had 39 people joining at the same time. Of that 39, 30 were women, so women have been joining the profession in their droves for a long time. And yet, really getting women through into partnership and so on, that’s been a Herculean task and it’s one that keeps going or you keep slipping back. Cultural change is critical, but in addition, I think it’s about changing systems and the way organisations do things and the processes. For example, how do you progress in law? By getting the opportunity to do really great work, working with really great clients. And so the systematic change you can make on the business is how you allocate work. It’s very easy for a partner to say, ‘I’ve got this great new job in and Joe down the corridor did a really great job last time so I’ll get him to do it again’. But what about Jo without an E who’s just come back from maternity leave? So, it’s about creating systems which help people to think more broadly when they allocate work.