Throughout a career that has included fee earning, strategic, operational and innovation roles, I have often seen, at first hand, a lack of diversity and opportunity for anyone other than the white, middle class male in Big Law. I found my way to Big Law by accident. Being completely devoid of any keyboard skills I had nevertheless managed to pass a typing test and had taken a job as a legal secretary to a chain-smoking, female, wonderfully unapologetic and robust real estate lawyer, as a means of funding my law degree at night school. I am white, female and from the wrong social class. My pockets were neither deep enough nor full enough to afford me the kind of quality education that would have connected me to, or opened the door to opportunities in a large commercial law firm.
I was clearly not a very competent legal secretary because within weeks, following a brief exchange across the smoking room with the head of private equity, my boss had brokered a deal to ship me upstairs, out of her life and away from her typing. I was happy with her decision because here was an opportunity to do some real law whilst I finished working my way through a less than prestigious law school. And she was really, rather kindly, offering me a quiet leg-up.
I found myself in the private equity team of the corporate group of an international law firm, working as a paralegal. It was the perfect move. I was Rachel in Suits. I was immediately captured by the pace, the high financial stakes and lots of men dashing about in sharp suits talking on mobile phones but doing very little actual work.
What I didn’t give much thought to at the time was the lack of women or racial diversity. There were no cultural variations. There were virtually no character variations. There was no rich tapestry of social backgrounds. But, this noisy, busy ant hill was, in the early 2000s, making millions. It was the stuff TV shows were made of and I wanted a piece of it. I applied no thought process. I was still relatively young and single and felt incredibly lucky to find myself on this side of the curtain notwithstanding the increasing hours and the laser sharp, career-first focus all around me. I had no reason to consider my longer term future beyond the ability to support myself, and so assessing why the room was always filled with white, middle class men who talked about golf and skiing rather than football, was no consideration at all.
That was 25 years ago.
As my career went on, my life changed. I qualified, met my now husband, got married, had children and added a couple of dogs into the mix to create a family unit that would become my life’s infrastructure. For most women, that transition means taking on an extra role as a carer. Whether or not you can, do, or even want to hire people to help…whether or not you have a support mechanism living locally who can help with child care, emergencies, dog walking and general family logistics, you are the glue that keeps it together. And therein starts the guilt and the doubt, because there are only 24 hours in any given day. It’s at that point, when the end of every day is leeching some way into the next and you begin to operate in a fog of exhaustion and weariness, that the sparkle disappears and the anxiety sets in.
As a mother of two growing children, I began to realise why the room had, all those years ago, and still was, full of white, middle class men. There was no place for the guilt of a working mother, or any space for higher priorities. This place was reserved for those whose only priority would be their work – a well educated crowd with a network of professional and domestic support that would underpin their career trajectory.
Without diversity, we are all prone to hire in our own image. With no diversity of thought we can’t progress. Without progress we can never shape our workplace to accommodate what are now, shared home and parental responsibilities. The lawyers of today are part of the sandwich generation, desperately trying to care for both aging parents and growing children, whilst also wanting a fulfilling occupation and the ability to make a generally positive contribution to society. Big Law hasn’t progressed. It hasn’t become more diverse. It has though, paid the price.
The Price
Robert Broudie, a well known and talented civil rights lawyer and the elder brother of Lightning Seeds’ frontman, Ian, jumped from above the proud bells of Liverpool Cathedral in 2006 after a long struggle with mental ill health. He was 58 years old. “Feelings of anxiousness coupled with a frenetic work rate and determination seemed to have worn him down,” wrote The Guardian.
Banking and commercial City lawyer, Catherine Bailey, drowned herself in the Thames at the age of 41 after struggling with the demands of juggling work and family life. That was 2009. That particular struggle is one articulated by many women in the legal profession. When a colleague of mine, on the brink of partnership, became pregnant and asked of her female partner mentors, ‘What happens when I need to be available for my children?’, she was cut off with the reply ‘Well, surely you will have a full time nanny’. Work, it seems, is expected to take priority. Whilst many men accept that, many women struggle with it – but either try and make it work, as Catherine Bailey did, or become a loss to the profession, which tragically Catherine also did.
In 2010, Robert Worrall jumped in front of a tube train shortly after returning from his honeymoon. He was a rising talent working for one of London‘s Magic Circle firms when he died under the train at Oxford Street station.
David Latham was a 56 year old, successful and well known IP lawyer and partner at a Silver Circle firm in London. He was at the peak of his career. In 2013, he also took his own life by jumping in front of a train. He had told colleagues of his intentions but was dismissed. This world of cookie cutter, corporate warriors with neither diversity of gender, culture nor thought, could not even comprehend or acknowledge that the kind of stress generated by having to be ‘on it’ 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, is actually quite deadly.
In 2014, Stephen Gale, a successful restructuring and insolvency lawyer, took a fatal overdose. At his inquest, the coroner heard evidence of a significant change in his behaviour in the run up to his death – the kind of public behavioural change that had alerted his colleagues to a potential problem. And yet this was an international law firm where the expectation is no secret and the impact of that kind of subliminal pressure is adverse for many. Still nothing changed. No one intervened to help and Stephen became another casualty of the profession.
In 2015, Sarah Johnson, another successful lawyer, jumped in front of a tube train, this time at Victoria Station. Sarah was tortured by the idea that she wasn’t a good enough mother to her children, struggling with the growing competing demands of work and home. She was only 36. She was already hugely wealthy and so rather than being driven forward under this unrelenting expectation of perfection in order to provide for her family, it was perhaps simply to satisfy the expectation itself.
In 2023, the issue of mental ill-health in the legal profession raised attention again when the widow of John Jones, a successful civil rights lawyer who took his own life in 2016, brought an action for negligence against Mr Jones’ former psychiatrist. It is worth considering why, in all of these cases, where the impact of stress, anxiety and depression are playing out in the workplace, there were no measures put in place to facilitate change. I would argue that that was not an obligation sitting entirely with the health care professionals, particularly when these cases are all too commonplace and where the same narrative plays out across BigLaw every single day. If the message is so loud, why aren’t we listening?
Sadly this list goes on.
This week we heard the findings of the inquest into the death of Vanessa Ford in 2023. Vanessa was a partner at a City law firm and died at the age of 47. Whilst her death was not conclusively ruled as suicide, she was later described by the coroner as having had an “acute mental health crisis”. In the run up to her death, she had reportedly worked 18 hours a day and through her holiday – a description of working life that is far too familiar for far too many in the legal profession today.
So why are we still doing this? Big Law recruits from the same place, the same social background, and ends up with people who are fundamentally… well, the same. It then fosters a mindset that encourages its people to pile on the hours and strive for full time perfection. They fail. They fail in their home lives, their relationships and ultimately their careers.
Ironically, this week, as the findings of Ms Fords inquest were hitting the headlines, legaloperations.co.uk spoke to a recruitment consultant who quite openly described the ‘up or out’ mindset of US law firms in London. ‘Up or out’ simply means that your career is done after 6 years unless you are already on a clear partnership track. To hell with a love of the law, or frankly, a talent for it – if you aren’t already becoming a salesman for your firm, with a business plan tucked neatly under one arm, you’re doomed. If you were one of the hundreds of women simply not prepared to pay the price for partnership – woe betide you if you think you might maintain a long career doing the job you love, and are good at, without selling your soul to what is nothing more than an avaricious priority. That’s not a great outlook for women in particular and is the single most cited reason for women leaving the profession – they don’t believe they can have it all because in all reality, they can’t. But if that is the mandate put out to recruiters and those are the messages those recruiters are giving to a market filled with outstanding talent, then the law will never change and progress will never happen.
Even if we look at the psychology of it all, it doesn’t add up. The majority of lawyers are naturally introverts. They aren’t gregarious, champagne swigging extroverts. Salesmen however, are in a very different place on the personality spectra to lawyers and yet partners have to be successful salesmen for multi-million pound businesses. Try and switch an introvert to extroversion or vice versa – expect one to behave more like the other – which is precisely what we do when we welcome someone into the partnership in a Big Law firm – and you have potential for a mental health disaster. Make that transition to the pointy end of the lawyer’s career path (the “up”), the only option for a lifelong career (sending the rest “out”) and we put the mental health of a lot of good people at risk.
Perhaps there is an argument here for more listed law firms or legal services companies limited by shares, where lawyers can be lawyers and commercial and operational people can run the business. That would be great for both the lawyers and their clients. It would foster innovation rather than a fear of it. It would drive efficiency and high quality rather than 18 hours a day in the seat to secure 18 hours a day of fees. It would create the opportunity to retain talent without sending it all to the pointy end of the hierarchy. I’m not suggesting that the law firm model is a bad one – it’s actually a very commercially successful one. It’s just no longer fit for purpose in a modern world because it doesn’t take account of a population that has evolved and changed in such significant ways.
So to Robert, Catherine, Robert, David, Stephen, Sarah, John and Vanessa (and for the many more who have followed your path) – you represent too much loss from a profession that I was always proud to be part of. Sitting now, in the engine room, as a legal operations professional I see a whole host of tools, data and options that would allow Big Law to evolve and progress whilst giving its people and its clients more of what they need and want – and far less reason to jump in front of a moving train. From collaborative and innovative ways of producing work product to greater honesty, transparency and realism in the promises made in RfPs – by thinking smarter and applying some well needed diversity of thought, law firms would begin to evolve alongside their clients instead of counter to the needs of their workforce.