CLIENTS are increasingly challenging law firms to provide their “diversity credentials” when they pitch for work.

As pressure grows on firms to publicise the ethnic make-up of their workforce, leading firms and lawyers are backing the launch on Thursday of an online Black Lawyers Directory (www.onlineBLD.com) that will showcase individual lawyers from black and ethnic minority backgrounds, provide networking opportunities and careers advice as well as enabling organisations to advertise job vacancies, tenders and procurements.

John Lucy is head of human resources at Herbert Smith, one of the directory’s first sponsors. “Clients are starting to ask about diversity — predominantly public sector organisations but increasingly some of the banks.

“The black and ethnic minority population is pretty much under-represented in the City as a whole. There is a dire need for talent in all the leading law firms yet there are very bright people we are not able to attract. We are supporting the directory as one of the steps we are taking to encourage the brightest lawyers to the firm.”

Herbert Smith is planning to publish statistics on the gender and ethnic background of its staff on its website. At present, 15 per cent of its trainees and 12 per cent of its associates are from black or ethnic minority backgrounds. However, so far, only 2 per cent are partners.

Debo Nwauzu, a solicitor, is the directory’s founder. She ran her own legal aid law firm in North London before becoming a consultant. “Diversity is a huge issue. When you look at the statistics, the situation isn’t good,” she says. “But I don’t believe in moaning and complaining but in doing something to improve it.”

She says the heart of the directory will be the section on individual lawyers, who will be able to post their profiles for free. Organisations with at least one black and ethnic minority lawyer will also be listed for free. The directory will be funded by advertising on its website, with job adverts so far from law firms such as DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Cary, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and Wragge & Co.

Nwauzu highlights statistics from the Law Society, the solicitors’ professional body, which show that black and ethnic minority solicitors make up 9 per cent of all practising solicitors. A quarter of law students and 19 per cent of trainees come from ethnic minority groups. However, those in private practice are more likely to work in smaller firms, while only 23 per cent are partners, compared with 39 per cent of white solicitors.

According to the Bar Council, 11 per cent of barristers are from ethnic minority groups, who accounted for 17 per cent of pupils last year. A greater percentage of barristers are in employed positions (14 per cent) than at the independent Bar (10 per cent).

Courtenay Griffiths, QC, the leading criminal barrister and joint head of chambers at Garden Court, says that the directory is “long overdue because one of the problems minority lawyers face is one of exposure”. “The Bar has done a lot to improve opportunities but when you look at the figures more closely, you will see there is no room for complacency because many are concentrated in the less well paid areas of work — publicly funded crime, family, immigration and employment. There is still very much a glass ceiling when it comes to commercial and privately funded work.”

He says that the pressure is on City firms because many US clients are insisting on greater diversity and that attitude is coming over here. “The Bar can’t afford to be blinkered about this because it will feed through the system. But we are not talking purely about race here — class is very much an issue when it comes to the glass ceiling. Many of the large commercial sets don’t look beyond Oxford and Cambridge.”

One young lawyer who has succeeded in his ambition to become a City lawyer is Chuka Umunna, 27, an 18-month-qualified employment lawyer at Herbert Smith. With a Nigerian father and Anglo-Irish mother, he says that he was helped by his middle-class background and family tradition in the law — his mother is a solicitor, his uncle is Patrick Milmo, QC, the leading libel silk, and his grandfather, Mr Justice Milmo, was a High Court judge.

However, many others, particularly those from a black African or Afro-Caribbean background, don’t have access to that pool of knowledge, he says. “The value of having contacts with people in the leading law firms and barristers chambers for those who don’t fit the profile of having been to a decent school and one of the top universities is hugely underestimated.

“Leading law firms are not full of racists. These people are generally too intelligent to hold such prejudices. If someone is going to make them money, they will recruit them. It’s more about class and culture than outright prejudice, about how they think someone will fit in.”

Shahzad Aziz, 32, a barrister who specialises in human rights, discrimination and crime at St Ive’s Chambers in Birmingham, says: “The directory should help to dispel the myth that you need to be white, middle class, public school to be a lawyer because people will see what black and Asian lawyers are achieving. It will also help practitioners like me by providing good networking opportunities and it will benefit employers in recruitment.”

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