Equality, diversity, and inclusion report
“We've built solid foundations, so now is the time to push even further – embedding EDI as a core thread within everything we do.”
Our vision
Our vision is to promote, protect and support solicitors, the rule of law and justice in England and Wales.
We can only achieve this through every single colleague bringing their individual talents and experience to work together towards our collective goals.
As part of our 2022-2025 corporate strategy, we continued investing time and resources into our internal EDI foundations.
Our EDI report
Four years ago, we began publishing annual EDI action plans to:
- strengthen accountability
- increase transparency
- share our priorities, progress and insights with both our employees and our members
Today, we’re in a much stronger position than when we published our first plan.
This report is a review of our internal EDI activity over the last business year.
It will show:
- the progress we have made in the past year
- where we are now
- the steps we plan to take to improve our EDI strategy in the future
This report also explores our 2025 pay gap data.
All UK companies with 250 or more employees are required to publish gender pay gap information.
We strive to be open and transparent with our members, which is why we’ve chosen to also publish data on our disability, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation and identity and trans identity pay gaps.
Reflections on the past year
Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)
Our ERGs continued to deliver fantastic work.
REACH (Race, Ethnicity and Cultural Heritage):
- has been involved in the 10,000 Black Interns programme since 2022
- designed and delivered our reverse mentoring pilot
- advocated for new anonymised recruitment
Open Minds, our mental health and wellbeing ERG:
- is reviewing our organisational policies on health and wellbeing
- delivered and supported sessions on wellbeing and neurodiversity awareness
WAVE (Women’s Action and Voice for Equality):
- was involved in creating more inclusive bathroom spaces
- hosted sessions over the past three years on gender equality, allyship and inclusion
SAFE (Support and Advocacy for Faith Education):
- hosted events for colleagues to share faith and religious practices, including iftar events
- provided guidance on supporting colleagues who fast for religious observances
OutLaws, which is currently an informal peer support group, has had conversations leading to various policies, including our Transitioning at Work policy and guidance.
Progress on our 2024/25 goals
We said that we would:
- implement and review our new approach to Equality Impact Assessments (EIAs)
- pilot an approach for teams to create their own EDI commitments
- provide neurodiversity training and a toolkit
In 2025, we trained seven colleagues as EIA champions. They worked with our new EDI lead to run a six-month pilot of our EIA approach, which is currently being reviewed.
We’ve offered various neurodiversity training sessions to colleagues as part of our learning offer.
Following consultation, we’ve broadened the neurodiversity toolkit to cover both disability and neuro-inclusion, which we will share with staff in 2026.
Several teams have already integrated EDI into their business plans, such as through digital accessibility initiatives.
Our new internal EDI strategy will offer a strong and clear framework to help teams develop local EDI objectives.
We said that we would:
- implement recommendations from the Business Disability Forum as part of our Disability Confident Level 3 accreditation
- implement accessibility improvements to 113 Chancery Lane
We introduced strengthened guidance for managers on the Disability Confident scheme and inclusive job description templates.
Work to improve building accessibility is ongoing.
We also replaced our Sickness Absence Policy with a more holistic Ill Health Capability Policy, offering clearer assurance to disabled colleagues about how absence and adjustments will be managed.
This policy was reviewed by the Business Disability Forum.
We said that we would:
- run a safe-space campaign with ERGs to increase understanding of psychological safety at work
- respond to new legislative duties under the Equality Act 2010 to prevent sexual harassment
We implemented a mandatory e-learning session for all colleagues on how to recognise, prevent and report sexual harassment.
We’ve also begun to implement a centralised record of all claims related to harassment and discrimination.
Working with our EDI Steering Group, we’re pausing work on the safe-space campaign to align it with our new initiatives under permanent commitment one of our 2025-2028 corporate strategy.
We said that we would:
- improve completion of our demographic diversity data and overlay with other HR data (such as employee relations issues and retention)
- begin reporting on socio-economic pay gap
We’re currently creating a Power BI dashboard that will allow us to overlay the data, while continuing to encourage our staff to share demographic information.
We still need to improve our data collection before starting socio-economic pay gap reporting.
See the full EDI report for a summary of our achievements over our entire 2022-2025 corporate strategy.
Gender
Our staff are 61.8% female and 38.2% male.
We recognize that not all employees categorise themselves in a binary way, which is required by law.
Pay gap
Pay gaps are different from the right to equal pay.
Equal pay is providing the same pay irrespective of a protected characteristic for those doing the same or similar work or work that is different but of equal value.
Pay gaps highlight the difference between the average pay of one group (for example, females) and the average pay of another group (for example, males), irrespective of any differences in the work they do.
As a result, it is affected by how the workforce is made up, including the numbers of individuals in the respective groups, types of jobs and levels of seniority.
Our EDI and pay gap reports highlight:
- our senior leadership team is 54.5% female and 45.5% male
- our median gender pay gap is 7.7% (a 2% decrease from 2024)
Race and ethnicity
Of the employees who reported their ethnicity:
- 33% identified as minority ethnic
- 67% identified as white
In the census breakdown, the largest groups identified by staff were:
- white: 64.8%
- Asian or Asian British: 17.0%
- Black or black British: 9.1%
Pay gap
The 2025 median ethnicity pay gap decreased by 2.3% to 8.7%, showing positive progress.
Disability
13.7% of our staff identified as disabled.
Pay gap
Our 2025 mean pay gap decreased to -5.0%, in favour of disabled employees.
Sexual orientation and identity
Of our staff that responded:
- 9.0% identified as LGB+
- 81.4% identified as straight
- 9.6% preferred not to say
Pay gap
The median pay gap is 3.2%, in favour of heterosexual staff.
Due to a limited number of respondents, the results likely show high variability year on year.
Social mobility
22.8% of our staff were eligible for free school meals at some point in their schooling.
Regarding the type of school staff members attended:
- 66% attended a state school
- 21.5% attended school outside of the UK
- 8.2% attended a fee-paying school
- 2% attended a fee-paying school with a bursary or scholarship
40.2% of employees’ parents went to university by the time they were 18.
57% of employees’ parents worked in occupations of a higher SES background.
Religion and belief
The largest faiths identified among our staff were:
- no religion/atheist: 30.6%
- Christian: 24.6%
- Muslim: 7.5%
- Hindu: 6.3%
17.1% of staff preferred not to say.
Reducing our pay gaps
We have a range of current practices in place to support the reduction of our pay gaps:
- Flexible and hybrid working: we accommodate employees’ different circumstances and needs
- Data collection and analysis: we collect and monitor diversity data to better understand the barriers different groups face
- Stakeholder engagement: we work with our Employee Forum, ERGs and Union to gather insight/feedback on potential barriers to retention and progression
- Transparency and reporting: we report on our pay gaps
- Standardised recruitment: we use anonymised sifting, structured interviews and scoring criteria
Our pay gap report lays out the steps we’ll take in the next year to continue reducing gaps.
Looking forward
In 2025/26, we are co-creating a refreshed internal EDI strategy that reflects our ambitions, colleague feedback and emerging best practice.
Wherever possible, we’ll seek to align our internal facing EDI work with our new member-focused EDI and wellbeing strategy.
Our ongoing goals are to:
- roll out our finalised EIA approach
- embed EDI principles in our coaching and mentoring framework
- host our latest cohort of interns through the 10,000 Black Interns programme
- continue to support our ERGs to deliver on their ambitions around awareness raising
- embed EDI into a review of our ways of working and how we use our office space
- review our Leading with Impact programme and other learning offers to embed EDI best practice
- review our approach to preventing third-party sexual harassment
- continue to work with colleagues to consider EDI in their local objectives and priorities