Case study: Addleshaw Goddard LLP

THE FEMALE FACTOR

Jane Amphlett, a partner and equality team leader at UK law firm Addleshaw Goddard LLP, discusses how her firm plans to attract, retain and train female professionals.

The legal profession in the UK has little difficulty attracting women at entry level – over 60 per cent of those registered to study at the Law Society are women and, if current trends continue, by 2015 there will be more female lawyers than male. Sixty-six per cent of our intake of graduates at Addleshaw Goddard LLP (AG) in 2008 were women and this is not a new trend: many of my female colleagues recall at least a 50:50 gender split when they were trainees in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. Why then are more women not making partner?
It was this question that drove AG to establish its diversity team over three years ago. In those three years, we identified a number of key areas which, we believe, have been helping us to meet our strategic goal of attracting, retaining and developing talented female professionals within our firm.

Flexible working
Our flexible working programme is the first of these key areas. Devised in response to direct feedback received from our staff, as well as a need to react to the changing world of work, it has become an integral part of the way we work within the firm. A staff opinion survey conducted in 2006 informed us that a good work life balance and, specifically, flexibility around how our people carry out their work was one of the most important factors associated with job satisfaction. Notably, this feedback came from both men and women.
We were also aware that we were losing talented women at around three to four years post qualification and that lack of work life balance was often stated as the reason for this. We assessed each lost associate solicitor at this level as a loss of investment alone of around £200,000, in addition to the other costs such as recruitment fees. This investment was typically either moving in-house or leaving the law completely.
In an attempt to address some of these issues, in early 2007 we launched our ‘pathfinder’ initiative within the corporate division of our Manchester office, in early 2007. This involved asking 15 volunteers, from differing roles in the legal sphere, from partners and associates to trainees and support, to participate in a scheme which would look at all aspects of flexible working, including IT requirements and impact on office space. The volunteers gave up their desks and entered the flexi-work area with the intention that they spend more of their time working outside the office, be that from our other offices, from clients’ offices or from home. All were issued with all the necessary IT equipment and with guidance to help them with the practical aspects of working in this way. Fundamentally, the pathfinder was not seen as a pilot but more of a different way of working that we wanted to adapt and refine over time. Feedback was vital and was in fact overwhelmingly positive. We now have similar flexi-areas in our London corporate team and in other divisions throughout the firm. We have also extended to some of our business services areas and have seen client service not only maintained, but improved.
The pathfinder has been key to creating a culture within the firm in which flexible working is acceptable.
Although it is clear that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution, and a working pattern which fits in one area of the business is not necessarily going to fit in another, we have sought to build on our pathfinder success with a few other successful examples of varied working pattern. As well as standard part-time, we now also have people working on annualised hours, job-sharing, term time working and with longer holiday arrangements.
When an individual makes a formal flexible-working request, we consider the needs of the firm, the team, the department and individuals before assessing how to proceed. No distinction is made around the reason for the request and we have a number of people now working flexibly on a formal contractual basis for reasons other than child care. Around 14 per cent of the firm have in place a formal flexible working arrangement, 10 per cent of these are men, and we have many more people working flexibly on an ad hoc basis.
In addition, in order to facilitate home and out-of-office working, we have made substantial investments in IT over the past two years, particularly in providing laptops and blackberry mobile devices. Thirty-six per cent of the computers we have within the firm are now laptops.
For our corporate department the cultural change towards a flexible working environment, where transactions can now be managed remotely, has resulted in a more ‘female friendly’ image emerging. The impact is evident – we have moved from one female partner to five in the past 18 months. Two of these have been external hires and two internal promotions.
The impact across the wider firm can also be clearly demonstrated. Our ranking in The Times ‘Best Companies to Work for in the UK’ list, for example, moved up an incredible 42 places this year to number 40, with the feedback gathered clearly stating that this is in part attributable to our approach to flexible working.
We know that we still have much work to do, and so we recently sponsored a piece of research, conducted by the leading UK charity Working Families, looking specifically at the barriers to achieving work life balance within law firms. Legal Lives, Retaining Talent Through a Balanced Culture was published at a high profile conference in October 2008, and we were delighted that the UK’s Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, was able to address the conference on this important issue. Thirteen firms took part in the research and the report highlights some of the key issues which those firms see as barriers to achieving a good work life balance. Importantly, it also provides a practical toolkit for firms to give some guidance on how to tackle some of these issues.

Role models
While flexible working is often viewed as the key to attracting and retaining talented women within the legal profession, and our experience is that it is extremely important, we believe it is not the only necessary ingredient. The importance of role models is well documented and it is something that we have concentrated on establishing over the past year.
Although attracting women at entry level is not an issue, female representation at the more senior levels is a focus for us. Twenty-two per cent of our partnership are female (an increase of three per cent over the past two years) and last year women comprised 59 per cent of those to whom we made offers, including 50 per cent of our external partner hires. Internally, we are doing even better, with women making up 67 per cent of our partner promotions in 2008. Invariably, this results in a growing pool of good role models for young aspiring women in our business.
Furthermore, through groups such as our ‘senior women’s network’, we encourage individuals to consider putting themselves forward for leadership positions, identifying the support and, if appropriate, coaching they may need to achieve this. We also encourage women to look outside the firm for encouragement and support, such as the Women as Leaders programme at the UK’s Cranfield University School of Management, which one of our partners recently attended.
Of our eight-person board, three are women – that is nearly 40 per cent and up from 25 per cent in 2007 – and is evidence of this focus on encouraging senior women to take up leadership roles is having a positive impact. We now have female representation on our management committee, and our first female executive committee member was appointed earlier this year, meaning that we have female representation on each of our key leadership bodies.
Building on the inspiration that role models can undoubtedly provide, we also recently launched an ‘Inspirational Speakers programme’. This aims to profile successful people from outside the firm who are either women or whose work has had a direct effect on women. One of our first speakers was Emma Rowlands, the 24 year old co-founder of E3unlimited and one of only a few women to be shortlisted in Management Today’s 2008 ‘35 women under 35’. In inviting Emma to speak, we wanted to highlight young talent and entrepreneurship to our own audience and invited guests.
Understanding the needs and aspirations of the millennial generation, Generation Y (Gen Y) is important in ensuring a continual flow of talent into our firm. We have recently been working alongside Ask Gen Y – a UK-based Generation Y consultancy – to understand what will attract and retain Gen Ys in our firm. This culminated in the roll out of a road-show outlining the changing world of work and equipping decision-makers with the necessary tools for developing a working environment that responds appropriately to the needs of a new generation of talented young professionals.

Different career options
Our consideration of Gen Y has confirmed in our minds the trend that, for many of our lawyers, partnership is no longer the ultimate goal. Our response has been to develop real alternative career options and two distinctly different roles have emerged – legal director and managing associate.
The legal director role, created in 2002 and developed in recent years, has helped retain talented senior lawyers who are keen and capable to progress, but who may not want to become partners or for whom partnership is not right at that time. Importantly, the role is not a barrier to partnership and, a number of legal directors (including three women) have in fact successfully progressed to partnership. However, this enhanced role has proved very attractive to women who currently make up over a third of our legal director population.
The managing associate role was created in September 2007 and provides formal recognition that a lawyer is demonstrating key competencies which may lead to partnership. As part of the route to managing associate, our associate solicitors attend an intensive development centre and are matched with a trained (partner level) mentor to help them work on an individual development plan. Over 40 per cent of our current managing associate population are female and, again, feedback suggests that this formal recognition is helping to retain talent within our firm.
Thinking through the practical issues associated with combining a career in law with parenthood has also been an important exercise for us. Our ‘Little Additions programme’ is aimed at those who are expecting and new parents and offers lunchtime sessions based around practical advice on many of the areas associated with maternity and paternity leave. This is followed up by return-to-work sessions covering networking opportunities and business focused re-integration sessions. We are accredited by the UK children’s charity Tommy’s Pregnancy Programme. Several of our most talented female lawyers have also benefited from external return-to-work courses which focus on guiding and building their careers throughout parenthood and the opportunity to network with women from other business areas.

Our clients
The imperative to address these issues lies not only in ensuring that we attract the best people and afford everyone an opportunity to achieve their potential but also in the fact that many of our key clients place diversity at the hearts of their business and so want to know that we mirror the priorities of their organisations and the wider community.
Building relationships with women from within our client organisations is also extremely important and we have been consciously moving away from the traditional sporting (and arguably male-focused) client entertainments to a more eclectic mix, including some with a distinctly female focus.

Developing our brand for the future
External recognition for our initiatives includes the diversity-focused membership organisation Opportunity Now’s award for ‘Advancing Women in Business’ for our flexible working programme and, more recently, the Women of the Future Corporate Award in recognition of our gender-equality initiatives. In addition, women partners acting as both role models and mentors have helped to attract and retain more women, as has our increased profile from our inclusion in shortlists such as The Sunday Times '100 Best Companies to Work for in the UK' and Aurora/Times 'Top 50 Places Where Women Want to Work'.
Feedback from those who have joined us, especially at partner level, shows that we are building a reputation as an employer for choice for many women. One partner who joined us last year commented: ‘I was surprised to see flexible working so deeply embedded within a law firm and in such a commercially minded way.’
Of course there is still much to do, and we will continue to strive to find ways to attract more women to AG, to retain them and to provide them with the opportunity to take up senior roles within the firm.

Jane Amphlett is a partner and head of the equality team at UK law firm Addleshaw Goddard LLP. She can be contacted at jane.amphlett@addleshawgoddard.com