Attorney General's Office

Attorney General: Speech to Lovell's Women's Network event

I am delighted to be here tonight, in a room full of inspiring lawyers dedicated to increasing diversity at senior levels within the legal profession.

You have demonstrated this through networking and through your support and promotion of equal opportunities.

As the first female and black Attorney General in over 700 years we have come a long way from where we were, and are moving towards a better future for the coming generations. It will take each of us to individually and collectively make a difference. I hope that by the time each of you leave tonight you will each aspire to deliver three things that you can do to help address this important issue.

Importance of increasing diversity at senior level

The latest Legal Week Big Question survey found more than 2/3 of respondents (67%) felt representation of women at a senior level was either 'poor' or 'could be better'. [July 2009]

General representation of women in the legal profession was felt to be improving, however according to 65% of the 216 partners responding to the survey, [including 31% who thought it was 'good' and 10% who judged it to be excellent']-there is still some way to go.

The finding reflects the fact that more women than men are now entering the legal profession, though partnerships at major City firms remain dominated by men.

Barriers
We know that one of the key barriers is the lack of attainability of partnership as women struggle to combine family commitments with the demands made of senior lawyers.

What difference have women lawyers made?

Women Lawyers as policy makers have helped shape the course of history & improve the legal landscape; examples include Harriet Harman and her role as Leader for the House of Commons and Minister for Women & Equality, the Solicitor General who is a Law Officer and Minister on Equality, Brenda Hale-female judge on the new Supreme Court.

What has been achieved in government?
Integrated cross government work on equality, violence against women, children's services including improving access to child care, the Children's Act, to name a few.

Lady Hale as example-brings a knowledge rare among judges of the workings of Whitehall and the ins and outs of the legislative process from her 10 years on the Law Commission, including five years working on the gestation of the ground-breaking Children Act.

What needs to be done to help address disparity in the legal profession/politics?

• There must be transparency and the eradication of elitism.
• There must be local level dialogue with schools and universities to engage in youth who in the future may decide to take law/politics as a career pathway.
• Workshops and shadowing as well as some form of mentoring scheme to encourage women and other minorities should be used. [AG Youth Network example]
• The UK Government recently launched a campaign for achieving a healthy work-life balance.

Key areas highlighted by the government for action by employers are:

• knowing that both employers and employees benefit from work-life balance
• understanding that part time does not mean half hearted
• encouraging staff to work from home when appropriate
• enabling employees to share jobs and adopt flexible hours in school holidays
• allowing their employees paid paternity and maternity leave.

And the benefits can be felt in 3 areas:

• employees can reduce stress, and become more productive and motivated, and happier, as they achieve a better work-life balance
• companies can boost staff morale, and introduce practices which are more efficient and effective
• socially excluded groups who of necessity have to prioritise home life (e.g. because of caring responsibilities) may gain access to employment opportunities with companies which allow a better balance

Where we were-how far we have come
Looking around the room tonight at the number of women lawyers, it is worth remembering how far we have come;

• Four women passed the Law Society's examinations in 1922, and on December 18 that year the first woman solicitor was admitted.

• In 1913 the Law Society refused to allow four women to sit the Law Society examinations.

• The women took the case to the Court of Appeal. But in a famous case, Bebb v The Law Society, the Court of Appeal upheld the Law Society's decision. The Judge, Mr Justice Joyce, ruled that women were not "persons" within the meaning of the Solicitors Act of 1843.

• It was not until 1919, when the Sex Disqualification Act was passed, that women were allowed to practice law. The first women to pass their examination were Maud Crofts, Carrie Morrison, Mary Pickup and Mary Sykes in 1922.

Women trailblazers-making a difference
• Carrie Morrison finished her articles first out of the four women, and was the first woman to be admitted to the role of solicitor. She and Maud Crofts were already no strangers to sex discrimination.

• When they graduated from Girton College, Cambridge with First Class Honours, the university authorities refused to award them their degrees because they were women. Although they were allowed to study, attend lectures and sit exams, women could not hold degrees.

• Maud Crofts, who was involved in the 1913 Court of Appeal case, was a prominent suffragette. When she went into practice with her father and brother, her clientele included wealthy and influential members of the women's suffrage movement. Although these women were breaking new ground in Britain, their American counterparts had already pioneered the way. The first woman lawyer in the English-speaking world was Arabella Mansfield, who was admitted to the Iowa state bar in June 1869.

• But in Britain, it continued to be an uphill struggle for women even after 1922. If women did not have fathers or husbands who were lawyers, it was often financially impossible for them to get articles, for which there was a yearly premium of something between 300-500 guineas (1 guinea = 1 pound and one shilling, so in pounds £330-550, equivalent in 2009 money to about £60,000 - £110,000).

• Although wealthy parents may have been willing to invest in their sons, paying this amount for daughters was rare. In 1931, nine years after Carrie Morrison had been admitted, only about 100 women had qualified as solicitors.

• The numbers continued to rise relatively slowly until the last decade or so. As recently as 1967, only 2.7% of solicitors holding certificates were women....

% Women UK lawyers-we have come a long way
1957 1.94%
1967 2.7%
1971 3%
1977 7.33%
1985 13%
1987 16%
1997 32.75%
1999 35%
2010 40% (est) [1]

• More recently the number of women holding practising certificates has increased by 100% in the last 10 years. Women now make up 60% of admissions to the Law Society;
• Only 23% of partners in private law firms are women, however;
• 9% of solicitors in private practice come from a BME background;

Yet 30% of first year law students are from a BME background. Where have they gone?

Lawyers are driven individuals, hard working people who really want to succeed and make a difference, that the culture around being a lawyer, especially in private practice (but a number of us in the Government Legal Service have to consider it as well) is often focused on the number of hours spent working, in order to do business and to do it successfully.

We have to recognise these in order to really recognise where the challenges lie for creating a healthy work-life balance for lawyers.

You know as well as I do, the great rewards (and I don't merely mean financial) that a legal career can provide - the important, close, detailed work, the satisfaction of a job being done well, the thrill of being on one's feet and being able to answer the judge's questions and knowing that you have made a real difference in actually making justice happen.

But I don't want to speak of the challenges without at least giving you an idea of where the solutions may also lie. There are a number of ways in which a better work-life balance may be achievable for lawyers. This includes adapting working practice to increase "smart working".

What are we doing in Government to address?
We in the Government Legal Service know this as "smarter working", but it is absolutely the same concept and it is a notion firmly embedded in Government Legal Service thinking. It involves effort by the lawyers and by their employers to identify flexible and better fitting ways of getting work done - for example, having meetings to cover ground and obtain instructions where lawyers might previously have insisted on receiving instructions in writing, weeks before they had to advise.

It means greater collaboration between lawyers - both in terms of effectively sharing workloads so that one lawyer isn't over-burdened, but also a greater dialogue with and the level of understanding between employee and manager.

The Government has taken a number of steps to try to help improve work-life balance through the Work and Families Act 2006 (which received Royal Assent on 21st June 2006). The Act allows for changes to maternity leave and adoption leave and pay benefits for parents of children born or to be placed for adoption on or after 1st April 2007. It has extended statutory maternity pay, statutory adoption pay and maternity allowance entitlement from 26 weeks to 39 weeks.
Furthermore, the right to request flexible working was extended to carers of adults from 6 April 2007 (a development I consider to be particularly important).

The Crown Prosecution Service, which I superintend, and which is the largest employer in this country in terms of legal staff, is a very good example of a Department that has adopted flexible working and I am very pleased to say that this has proven very successful.

The Crown Prosecution Service as an employer, tries to arrange flexible working arrangements to suit employees wherever this can be met within the requirements of its business needs. The same attitude is taken by other Government Departments. We recognise that the benefits provided by allowing flexible working are very significant and more than justify taking this approach.

If you feel I need to "prove" my case to you about the successes we have had within the Government Legal Service, I should mention the statistics (from the Government Legal Service end of year report for 2007, reported in February 2008):

• There are over 1,900 lawyers within the Government Legal Service. Of these 61% are women. That's the same percentage as the number of women admitted to the Law Society;

At the Senior Civil Service level, 40% of these lawyers are women and at the most senior Senior Civil Service levels, 40% are women. This compares with the 23% of partners in law firms who are women.

Now after a period of 700 years, we have a female Attorney General and, notably, both Law Officers are female.

So how has the Government Legal Service achieved these figures? We offer excellent quality, high profile work, of great variety. So do you. We have a very positive approach towards career development and talent management and I am confident you do as well.

We also, however, take a positive approach towards diversity and flexible working. We offer the chance to do high-quality work but with flexible working arrangements including full-time, part-time, home working and job-sharing. I think this is the lynch-pin of our success. We've been doing it for some time - I know, for example, of a member of the Senior Civil Service who agreed with her Department (the then Department for Social Security) in 1990, when she returned to work from maternity leave, that she would work part-time (3 days per week). This may not seem that surprising but the next point perhaps is: it was her employers who suggested that to make this arrangement more workable, she should work partially at home so that she could manage her work and family life commitments in a non-traditional way. I should also emphasise that this was done for a business reason. She was an excellent asset of a lawyer that no-one wanted to lose, so her employer changed their procedures to accommodate her.

It is important to recognise within all of this that flexible working and a better-work life balance does not mean failing to meet a client's needs and expectations.

Pro bono Publico-'for the good of the public'
I have a great interest in pro bono and corporate social responsibility work because what they demonstrate to the lawyer engaged in them is a reminder of the reasons for being a lawyer. It helps them to be a voice for voices that cannot be heard. When a lawyer is engaged in what can seem like hard-edged work, it helps to revive some of the optimism and belief in a justice system that led them to become a lawyer in the first place.

Conclusion
What I believe we see with pro bono lawyers is that a light goes on when they do pro bono work and it makes it a bit easier to do that hard edged work they must carry out. So many lawyers have told me that with pro bono they get back far more than they give. I commend it to you as another way to achieve the work-life balance.

Women lawyers are making great gains in the legal and political sphere.

History is the work of our own hands. If we take this opportunity to make future history, and we make it with reason and with principle, we will leave the finest legacy for future generations.