Partner
I sit on the firm’s diversity steering group, and was one of a handful of partners who moved the firm in the direction of a more public profile on diversity. Pinsent Masons was the first law firm to figure in Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index, and the first to contribute to Stonewall’s Starting Out Recruitment Guide for university students.
I’m also a divisional head – and run one of the five groups that comprises the whole firm. I was a trainee in the firm myself – recruited from Cambridge in the mid-eighties, promoted to associate and then to partner in the early nineties. I think I am an ambitious person. I strive for excellence, and I think that as my confidence has grown, so my expectations of my career have become more demanding. The whole firm was 125 people when I joined it. It’s something like 1600 now. It has grown at a pace that has allowed me to excel at what I do, and pre-empted any possible need to look elsewhere.
When I started, I didn’t have the confidence to go straight to London. I was brought up in the North of England, so I picked the biggest nearby regional centre, which was Leeds, and applied to all seven of its major law firms. I then made sure to spend some time with the most promising, getting to know their personalities. I think it’s really important to do that, because on paper law firms can look very similar - you don’t really know what somewhere is like until you go and try it. You need to know you share the same values, and that you’ll feel comfortable in that environment.
I relocated from Leeds to London in 2005, but I only spend half my time here. I also head up property lawyers working in Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dubai. We are a multi-site firm and I don’t believe in managing people from afar. I absolutely rejoice in the wealth of talent we have here. I love having really talented people around me because I find the challenge to up my game is really exciting. The worst thing for me would be to walk into a room where everybody says ‘yes’.
I think that anybody who came into the legal profession when I did had an expectation of a future that’s completely changed. What we do now bears no relation to what we did then – nobody thought the world was going to globalise, that national and then international firms would merge, or that procurement would come in and commoditise vast chunks of the profession. That’s been a key factor in opening up accessibility.
How do you influence an organisation culturally to embrace diversity? In my experience, it always starts with an individual or group of individuals who feel passionately about something in their work environment enough to want to change it. If you develop a head of steam, then you start getting more and more people on your side and begin to achieve something – for example, the formation of a new employee network group. Once you’ve done that, you have to start delegating and empowering, and bringing in the next generation – then you can really start changing your culture.