As with other major City law firms, the diversity of our workforce is an issue that is becoming more important by the day.

Clients are increasingly expecting their service providers to share their values, and, in particular, their commitment to diversity. Public sector organisations have led on diversity for some time, but now it is not just them: demand is now driven just as strongly by the most sophisticated and profit-driven financial institutions. The prevailing sentiment is captured nicely by the possibly apocryphal story of a senior manager at a large car manufacturer who is said to have asked ,"How can I ask people to buy my cars if I won't employ their kids?"

For us, the equally stark reality is that if we do not get this right we may hurt our business. Law firms do the bulk of their professional recruitment at graduate level, bringing them in as trainees, with the hope of developing them into the next generation of partners. We believe that recruiting the best people inevitably means hiring people from a diverse range of backgrounds. If we cannot offer all our trainees a career path to the top, in an environment that allows them to be happy and productive, then we will lose good people and fall behind in the increasingly competitive market we operate in.

The partners of Baker & McKenzie have taken diversity very seriously for some time. As an international law firms, our people and clients come from all walks of life. Even so, the firm knows more can be done and has introduced more formal structures to ensure we support diversity. We are members of a long established diversity committee that is charged with ensuring we get it right. One of the most important steps our committee has taken in recent months is to confront the fact that partners of the firm may not necessarily be qualified to understand the challenges the firm faces in this area.

It is ironic that the people who generally control the delivery of work and career development may be least qualified to understand the demands that are made - for example, on the work-life balance of a new mother, or the level of distraction faced by a lawyer feeling obliged to describe the weekend without reference to the gender of their partner, or the frustration of someone who does not see any professional role models of the same ethnicity.

To assist our understanding of diversity, we have set up focus groups to act as a sounding board and to provide information. We started with an ethnicity focus group and, after the immediate success of that group, have added a women's group and a lesbian, gay and bisexual group.

We have learned that a partnership made up of nice, educated, liberal-minded people who say the right things at dinner parties may not be best-placed to provide answers without some assistance. We are pleased with the progress that was identified by our ethnicity focus group and have implemented that in our graduate recruitment programme. Now we look forward to being able to quickly make other changes that will make our firm a more comfortable, productive and successful place for everyone who works with us.

Tom Cassels is a litigation and public law partner at Baker & McKenzie and a member of the Times Law Panel. Samantha Mobley is head of the diversity committee at Baker & McKenzie's London office.

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