Norton Rose has emerged as the top-rated City firm in a diversity performance table for legal practices.
The international law firm, with 1000 lawyers in Europe, the Middle
East and Asia, had the highest score among City legal practices in the
2007 Diversity League Table produced by the Black Solicitors’ Network,
which represents ethnic minority lawyers in Europe.
The ranking is based on the proportion of ethnic minority and female
staff employed at partner, associate partner, trainee and paralegal
levels. Altogether 81 firms voluntarily submitted data. They included
63 of the largest UK practices, six from outside the top 100 and 12
international firms.
Norton Rose was especially praised for working with external agencies
to promote itself to women and ethnic minorities, through open days and
other methods. However, despite being the best City performer, it was
18th in the overall ranking, which was dominated by smaller firms. The
best performer was the 22-partner UK law firm Flint Bishop based in the
Midlands.
Patricia Chalé, a human resource management consultant and lead
researcher for the league table, said diversity monitoring was
relatively new to large law firms but was becoming more common, partly
because of the influence of their multinational company clients.
Law firms also now want a more diverse workforce as they feel it confers ‘competitive advantage’.
Nonetheless, only a handful of the 81 firms had targets for employing women and individuals from ethnic minorities.
The statistics show many women and members of ethnic minorities are
beginning to come through the lower ranks, but Chalé warned: ‘They must
be given the opportunity to progress if the imbalances [at higher
levels] are to be addressed.’
Firms highlighted for good practice included DLA Piper, which
participates in local authority schemes to encourage employers to
increase diversity in their workforces, Russell Jones & Walker,
which has an ‘equality impact assessment’, and Weil Gotshal &
Manges, which mentors students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
