Diversity in Chambers UK 2024

At Chambers, we keep a constant eye on diversity statistics. In particular, we look closely at the number of women we rank. We know that the legal industry (like all industries) has an ignoble history when it comes to fair treatment, but we don’t want our rankings to exacerbate that. Our rankings should be an unabridged list of the best lawyers, regardless of their sex or gender, or any other characteristic.  

Everyone in the legal profession must play their part in recognising the fact that additional hurdles have been placed in front of women wishing to climb to the top of the partnership, particularly at the most elite firms. This applies to Chambers, the firms themselves, and even clients.

Last year I wrote an article in which I pointed out that no magic circle firm had as “many” as 20% of women among its London-based partnership in the corporate department. Admittedly, I deliberately chose the most challenging data set I could – other departments and other firms are certainly performing better – but nevertheless, the fact that so few women hold a seat in what is thought by some to be the epitome of elite Big Law in London is a shock.

To reiterate: the problem wasn’t that the five firms were failing to hit 50%. They were failing to hit 20%.  

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Five years ago Chambers UK began a series of initiatives to improve our ability to shine a light on talented women in private practice. We began insisting that half of the interviews we conduct with law firms are held with women. This immediately had an impact on our statistics. This is due to several factors, one of which is that women are a little bit more likely to recommend other women, whereas men will tend to name other men in the first instance. And this applies to clients as well as those in private practice.  

We have had to battle with the sad fact that some firms refuse to allow us to interview the woman we ask to speak to. All of the firms that do this, of course, have sparkly diversity pages on their websites heralding the initiatives they put on to help various groups, including women. We will continue to do all we can to persuade firms that being ranked is not contingent upon being interviewed and that the longstanding, highly ranked male partner need not worry about being slighted if we prefer to speak to the female newly made partner. 

Chambers UK continues to work towards the milestone of achieving a ratio of 60:40 men:women among its ranked lawyers. We are tantalisingly close: it is 62.4 and 37.6. We typically improve this figure by about 1-2% every year, so it seems that we are only a year or two away from the milestone of having women compose 40% of our ranked lawyers. 

Sometimes raw numbers paint a different picture to percentages. The UK team is especially proud that it has added over 500 women to the rankings this year alone, taking our total to just shy of 5,000.

This is the result of a huge amount of hard work from the research team. Workshops put on by our internal DEI team helping us to understand unconscious bias and gendered language have been a tremendous help. But we are not patting ourselves on the back. We are redoubling our efforts to make sure that we reach that 40% figure as soon as possible. And when we do, we won’t stop.

Our ultimate goal is 50:50, because if you only look at raw talent, intellectual ability and work ethic, there is no reason why our rankings shouldn’t be entirely equal. And just to be totally clear: we never lower our standards when ranking women. Each and every one of them comes highly recommended by their clients and demonstrates considerable activity on sophisticated work, just as the men have.

Finally, it hopefully goes without saying that we do all of this while respecting the gender identity of all lawyers, including those who identify as non-binary.  

It is true that we have to work harder in certain practice areas, and when dealing with certain types of law firms. A disproportionate number of our ranked women can be found in tables such as Family/Matrimonial, Personal Injury and Employment. Fewer are ranked in Investment Funds, Shipping or Private Equity.

This is not for want of trying: indeed, there is a close correlation between the percentage of women we rank and the percentage of women put forward by firms in their submissions. Shipping submissions are among those with the fewest women mentioned in them. However, rather than blame this entirely on the legal profession and wash our hands of the problem, we must acknowledge that our mission is to identify the best legal talent wherever it is, and we must find it ourselves.