"You are a lawyer, a woman and have a family — and the big firms cannot tempt you with a partnership" says an influential article in The Times.
It is sad to see that we ("we" as in mainly male run law firms) have still failed to change our systems to allow 50% of lawyers to join us fully.
I have to say, though, that at Woolley & Co we can hardly be accused of that; indeed the opposite is the case.
We don’t have partners as such but we do have:
…4 managers of the business, 3 of whom are women
…20 specialist divorce lawyers (inc 1 barrister) 17 of whom are women.
I like to think that we select simply the best applicants for the vacancies we have. But did they in fact apply in the first place partly due to the inflexible approach from most law firms as against our approach which encourages home working, flexible hours and holidays?
What it does mean is that we can attract the cream of divorce lawyers to join us, partly due to our flexibility, when traditionally that standard of lawyer would have joined an old fashioned large law firm or have left the profession as they had no alternative.
We have been recruiting heavily in the last year and we still have family lawyer vacancies. But what pleases me most is to also see our clients benefitting from the flexible working approaches we use.
Andrew Woolley
Divorce solicitor