The “gender blind” law firm taking on City of London heavyweights
First Women Exclusives · October 14, 2015
Our maiden First Women Company of the Month features London-based law firm McMillan Williams Solicitors, with director of commercial development David Riddle filling us in on an approach to hiring described as “practical rather than emotional”.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority requires all law firms provide a diversity survey for employees to complete. It is not obligatory for employees, but it aims to collect a raft of data revealing the scale of diversity within businesses and the industry – covering areas such as ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation and gender.
In its Risk Outlook report for 2014/15, the chief executive of the SRA, Paul Philip, highlighted diversity as being particularly vital to the growth and strength of the sector.
“There is limited evidence that improvements are being made to enhance the diversity of the legal services workforce. Making the profession more diverse and representative will lead to benefits in quality and access to justice,” he said.
“We have a clear regulatory rationale to focus on this issue, but it is also in the interest of law firms to ensure each are recruiting and retaining the best talent in the workforce.”
McMillan Williams Solicitors, London-based but with 22 branches around the south of England, has just completed its latest annual SRA survey – allowing it to showcase the strong gender diversity within the business. It is one firm describes as “one of the most diverse workforces in the legal world”.
According to the report’s findings, McMillan has almost 50 per cent more female solicitors than male and the same amount of partners and managers. Women make up two out of five directors on the board and two-thirds of its trainees. Support staff such as secretarial and administration are predominantly female.
It’s gender diversity such as this which has helped it win awards from the likes of Working Mums for bringing in and supporting more women at work.
However David Riddle, director of commercial development at McMillan, said he was “surprised” by its award success and recent diversity figures – and he isn’t being disingenuous or modest.
The company’s success has come about by a simple focus on quality and a largely uncomplicated recruitment and retention strategy – rather than some grand diversity inclusion plan dreamt up over a series of board meetings with a list of endless targets ahead of it.
McMillan is not obsessed with the need to bump up its diversity scores. Rather, it is driven more by practical rather than emotional thinking.
“Without any specific intent, quotas or grand scheme behind us, we are a gender blind organisation,” explained Riddle.
“It’s a case of very straightforward meritocratic hiring practices where we choose the best quality candidate available. We also hire locally to our offices – we don’t look too far afield as we recognise that people want to work near where they live.
“Perhaps we’ve seen more diversity, particularly in London, as a result of going after that local pool. We’ve never faced a moment when we’ve said to ourselves ‘hold on what’s happening here – we need to hire more women!’ Pragmatic meritocracy has always been the way here from day one.”
The company’s flexible working strategy was also devised more with its clients in mind than its female staff.
McMillan offers employees remote working and working from home via cloud computing. All desktops and company software are accessible via large screen smartphones. Flexible hours are also available by agreement.
“The modern world is fast paced and employees need to have connectivity wherever they are to their clients and the office mothership. We want to deliver the best service to our clients and that means making our staff as accessible as they can be,” Riddle went on to say.
“Our employees can work from home or use their flexible hours in case of pressing family commitments, family sickness or even bad weather. Certainly the biggest and most dramatic uptake for our flexible hours has been by mums and female staff. School runs happen when they happen so they need to meet that commitment and then go home and log back in to the office. It has resonated strongly with working mums. These policies just make sense.”
This intense focus on recruitment and retention started three years ago when the decision was taken to aggressively scale up the size of the firm. Of the present 370 staff, a staggering 250 people have been hired over that period.
“The most dramatic demographic change we’ve seen in the company is that the average age of our staff has got younger. We have looked to invest in future solicitors, but again I stress that aside from looking at youth we have had no focused-hiring system such as gender. Our job descriptions are agnostic and just focused on quality,” Riddle emphasised.
“Nobody in the organisation has said anything against our recruitment or the gender balance. We expect a great deal of our solicitors, and consciously or otherwise they know that if we take the best people whatever sex or race they are it will help the whole team meet our goals.”
Riddle added that, undoubtedly, the policy changes and the resulting boost to diversity has helped the overall success of the business.
“It has helped us when recruiting the best candidates because, by offering these schemes, a candidate choosing between us and another will more likely choose us – especially if they are female,” he stated.
“It has helped us stand out as a firm and the awards we have won have given us a lot of pride. Clients are also more aware of us and feel better towards us so there are beneficial results for the business as well.”
As an SME, does Riddle have any thoughts about how difficult it is for a smaller business to make these changes compared to a larger firm?
“Perhaps SMEs and their owners and managers just feel safer recruiting and going with what they know,” he explained. “Meritocratic hiring is a philosophy rather than a gut-feel and perhaps younger SMEs especially go with their gut more. Whilst our expansion and increased diversity, not just in gender but in race, disability and sexual orientation, has led to untold benefits for our work culture, I can also see that it could cause conflicts from time to time as you have vastly different people and attitudes working together. In a larger firm that would be more easily managed through arbitration and larger HR departments. It would be easier to bear that conflict.”
So what advice would he have for SMEs wanting to improve the gender balance and gain the benefits experienced by McMillan?
“You have to be ruthlessly honest about your hiring practices. Are they outdated? How are your adverts worded? You need to make sure you are hiring on a meritocratic basis,” he commented. “If that does not solve the problem then you need to go away and devise a plan to improve the balance. By not hiring women you are missing out on half the country’s population. That makes no sense for your business or the wider economy.”
Ultimately, Riddle feels McMillan is ahead of the large City law firms when it comes to gender diversity. “The real top businesses now have the intent to get the balance right, but we are slightly ahead of them here,” he concluded.
