Case studies
Positive action: Ashurst
Ashurst is a leading international law firm advising corporates and financial institutions, with core businesses in M&A, corporate and structured finance. With a team of over 200 partners in 12 countries, it provides advice of the highest quality to organisations around the world.
Promoting equality and diversity
The firm is committed to providing equality of opportunity for all members of the firm and job applicants. The firm further promotes and sustains an open, inclusive and supportive working environment and recruits, develops and rewards employees and partners on merit and without regard to background, colour, nationality, national or ethnic origin, race, age, religion or belief, gender, marital status, sexual orientation, disability or political views.
Promoting diversity is a pillar of Ashurst's commitment to being a great place to work. This is achieved, in part, through the firm's employment policies and practices, but more importantly in the way in which we treat our colleagues - with mutual respect.
As part of this commitment the firm has a dedicated partner-led diversity committee which supports all employees in the firm to reach their potential within an inclusive culture. The firm also has diversity champions at all levels of the business and recently organised firm-wide training for all staff to raise awareness of how to work and interact in an inclusive way.
Programme for positive action
Whilst many of our practices and their respective impacts are seen as positive throughout the firm we genuinely believe we can always do more. With this in mind we decided to develop a positive action programme to ensure that it can both demonstrate and achieve greater flexibility, support and opportunity for our senior female lawyers to succeed within their job roles.
In May 2008 Ashurst launched a women's network, the purpose of which is to:
- Recruit, retain and promote talented professional women
- Provide a forum for professional women to network with colleagues
- Elevate ideas and issues to the diversity committee and senior management
- Expand business development opportunities with our clients and potential clients
Women's network activities are now spearheaded by an internal steering group led by partner Helen Burton. Activities include internal networking/educational events and external client events.
The first event: 'Women Partners' Question Time' was a great forum to launch the Ashurst women's network. There was a very high turnout, really positive feedback and much enthusiasm and ideas generated regarding potential future network activities.
Structure and support
Support and enthusiasm, particularly at senior partner level, ensured that the women's network played an active in the firms business goals and remains an ongoing area of focus. The challenges of any network group is centred around who can attend and focussing/ highlighting a particular group of people or population e.g. do you have to be a female lawyer to be able to attend? Every internal women's network event was communicated to all within the firm and all were invited to attend the events - men included .
The women's network has gone on to hold successful client facing events such as 'Gender Crunch' - an external event that looked at the impact of the economic downturn on senior professional women in the workplace and 'The Power of Charisma' - a client-facing event for women to network and learn techniques used by the charismatic people in the public eye.
The network has gone from strength to strength and has received enormous support from senior partner, Charlie Geffen. Morale amongst women lawyers within the firm has improved substantially due to visible measures being taken to tackle issues and provide support and networking opportunities to enable for women lawyers to talk about their concerns.
The network has also connected with our clients. The 'power of charisma' internal event was so well received that senior women associates invited their own clients to another workshop hosted at Ashurst. Feedback from clients included:
- "Great event! I really enjoyed the session and would definitely be interested if you run a follow up."
- "I thought the workshop was superb - I have been talking about it all day.....Thank you very much for inviting me. It was a great night."
- "An excellent evening both in terms of the content and delivery of the talk and the opportunity to catch up with friends and colleagues."
Monitoring and development
It is important as a business to recognise that although the firm has been successful in fulfilling its objective in avoiding complacency, we remain committed to monitoring perceptions amongst our associates to ensure that we are tackling the issues in a way that will both help and support those concerned. Furthermore, the firm monitors KPI's in relation to total numbers of senior women lawyers. However, due to the nature of progression within the legal sector, this will still take some time to see visible improvements.
Ashurst's commitment to becoming a great place to work will continue over the coming months with developments such as emergency child care cover for all, flexible working initiatives and senior female mentoring to name but a few initiatives. This will ensure that the objective of 'retaining senior female lawyers' remains as a key staple of the firm's strategy.
The women's network has now been ingrained into our culture and the firm will continue to provide a positive action programme to increase its retention of senior women, improve morale and develop enhanced client relationships.