Disabled lawyers barely represented in in-house legal roles
While 60% of UK lawyers working in-house are women, just 1.5% are disabled, while black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) lawyers are underrepresented, according to statistics published by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA).
However, in law firms, just 3% of lawyers consider themselves to be disabled—compared to 13% across the entire UK workforce.
Earlier this year, an SRA report noted that there is a reluctance among disabled legal professionals to inform their employers of their disability.
And, research from Cardiff Business School concluded that more than half of the solicitors and paralegals believe their career and promotion prospects are inferior to those of non-disabled colleagues.
Ethnicity
Only 18% of in-house lawyers are BAME, compared with 21% in law firms. In 2018, government figures reported that 13% of the workforce in England, Scotland and Wales were BAME.
Asian lawyers make up over two thirds (15%) of BAME lawyers, an increase of 6% since 2014. Black lawyers make up 3% of the total number of lawyers in firms (no change since 2017).
There’s very little difference by seniority among BAME lawyers, according to the SRA—21% of solicitors are BAME (down by 1% since 2017), compared with 22% of partners (up by 1% since 2017).
But the differences become sharper when you look at the breakdown of partners in firms by size, with both black and Asian lawyers significantly underrepresented in mid to large-size firms of six or more partners.
Firms with more than 50 partners have the lowest proportion of BAME partners (8%), no change since 2017.
Gender
Women make up 49% of lawyers in law firms, with a greater proportion of women in mid-size and larger firms.
But there are stark differences when you look at seniority—only 34% of partners are women. In large firms, with more than 50 partners, only 29% of women are partners.
“However, the gap has been narrowing over the past five years, with a slow but steady increase in female partners (up by 1% since 2017 and 3% since 2014). This represents an approximate increase of 10% in the proportion of female partners from 2014 to 2019,” said the SRA.
The Bar of England and Wales face the same issue. While women constitute 38% of the Bar (an increase of 0.6% in 2018), only 16.2% of Queens’ Counsel (QCs) are women, rising from 15.8% the previous year.
In the US, only one in five equity partners in US law firms are women and less than 8% are people of colour, according to a report from the National Association for Law Placement.
Social mobility
While 7% of the general UK population attended a fee-paying school, one in five lawyers has been privately-educated. Larger firms have the highest proportion of lawyers that attended private schools (32%).
However, over the past five years, there has been a change in the ratio of lawyers who attended fee-paying schools and state schools, said the SRA. In 2014, for every lawyer from a fee-paying school, there were 2.6 lawyers who attended a state school. In 2019 this had increased to 2.75.
A greater proportion of lawyers had parents with a degree level qualification (51%) compared to 27% of other staff, while 15% of lawyers had a parent who worked in one of the traditional professions (such as accountancy and legal) and 26% had a parent who worked in one of the modern professions (such as teaching).
Only 6% of solicitors and 6% of partners had a parent who worked in routine manual and service occupations.
The SRA collected the data in summer 2019 using information provided by 96% of law firms. This represented more than 186,000 people working in more than 9,500 firms.
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