An interview with…
Natasha Adams of Ashtons Legal
In June 2020, Natasha Adams of Ashtons Legal was awarded the Trainee Lawyer of the Year Award at the Cambridgeshire Law Society Legal Excellence Awards (an outstanding evening event for the Cambridgeshire legal community!) and her professional journey to date was featured in the July 2020 CLS Connect Newsletter.
Since then, Natasha has qualified as a solicitor in the commercial litigation team at Ashtons Legal. In the first of what we hope to be a series of interviews with a range of members across the Cambridgeshire legal community, we caught up with Natasha to discuss one of her passions in more detail: equality, diversity and inclusion (“EDI”) within the legal profession. Natasha is both the founder and current co-chair of the Ashtons Legal Diversity and Inclusion Committee and here are her answers to our questions.
How important do you feel the EDI agenda is within the Cambridgeshire legal community?
EDI has really come to the fore in the workplace, especially in the last ten years. The Cambridgeshire legal community is evolving and I think the importance of EDI is increasing steadily, however, as with most things, there is room for improvement.
The EDI agenda faces many challenges but the two mains ones are: firstly, the hesitancy to engage with it and secondly, the fact that it is a multi-faceted issue impacted by many societal and historical factors.
Late last year I attended the Diversity & Inclusion Forum hosted by the Law Society in Cambridge. One of the concerns discussed was that those with fewer diverse characteristics (for example, an able-bodied heterosexual white male) may feel as though they cannot and shouldn’t participate in EDI initiatives because they don’t want to get it wrong or because they don’t have the characteristic concerned, like a disability.
In order to drive forward change, I think open discussions need to be had and we should try to get rid of the notion that someone has to have a certain characteristic in order to speak about it or recognise its importance. Limited impact can be had if we focus only on our own characteristics, a collective effort is required to create meaningful change.
The second difficulty, is that EDI doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is set in a societal and historical context which will impact how EDI initiatives can be launched and promoted at work. The social norms and unconscious bias we have all learned were taught long before we entered the workplace.
Examples of unconscious bias include: assuming a surgeon is male rather than female, that someone with a non-traditional Western / British name struggles to speak English and, to take the example of what we have seen recently, assuming a black female in Court is a defendant and not a barrister. It will take decades for these learned biases to become un-learned and I think steady progress is being made in the Cambridgeshire legal community.
What I think may spur on greater change is if businesses could examine their stay gap and endeavour to publish this data. A stay gap examines the differences in the average tenure of employees who have left the business in the last five years. A city law firm carried out this exercise in July this year and found that BAME employees left an average of two years and five months earlier than their white colleagues which hints at a lack of inclusivity within the firm. (citation: www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/aando-sets-diversity-targets-as-black-lawyers-report-shorter-tenures/5105190.article).
What strategies have you personally used to respond to EDI challenges?
The main EDI challenge I dealt with was deciding the scope of Ashtons’ Diversity and Inclusion Committee and what our overall objectives would be.
Starting the Diversity and Inclusion Committee was relatively easy as Ashtons’ senior management was genuinely enthusiastic about the idea and offered resource and the help of HR to get it off the ground.
What was challenging, however, was deciding what we were going to do. As ambitious as I am, I recognised that the initiatives would need to be well thought through, progressed steadily and aligned with the interests and core values of the firm.
There was an assumption early on that the Diversity and Inclusion Committee would be trying to change Ashtons’ recruitment process so that we would start positively discriminating to increase our diversity statistics. This was never in our plans. In fact, we have looked at our firm’s diversity data and actually, when compared with the Census for Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk, the firm was spot on!
Since EDI is such a broad topic it is easy to lose sight of what our objectives are so one of my strategies is to make sure that whenever we discuss an initiative, we make sure it is firstly, achieving an EDI goal, secondly, it is realistic given the resources we have and thirdly, it aligns with the firm’s core values.
How have you used your personal experience to bring EDI initiatives to Ashtons Legal via the Diversity and Inclusion Committee?
Several years ago when I was applying for training contracts as an undergraduate, I spent a lot of time researching firms so I could learn as much as possible about them through visiting recruitment fairs, perusing their websites and attending open days at their offices.
What I didn’t realise at first but steadily became more apparent to me over time was that the “Our People” section of the website was a really important factor as to whether or not I would submit an application.
On the majority (if not all) of these sites, I was disappointed to see the ratio of women to men at the senior levels of these businesses was far from 50:50. I found that some firms even listed their staff in order of hierarchy with their Managing Partner / CEO at the top and less senior roles towards the bottom. This painted a picture of how those with certain diverse characteristics occupied the top positions and those with different characteristics remained at the mid to lower tiers.
Whilst reviewing the “News” and “Insights” tabs of these websites,
I found an article published by a regional firm in the North which was celebrating the appointment of their first female partner in 2015. As desperate as I was for a training contract, I knew I didn’t want to go into that kind of environment, so
I didn’t apply.
When the Committee was established I wanted to ensure the firm’s website reflected the fact that we are a diverse and inclusive community and we are committed to improving and developing in this regard via the Diversity and Inclusion Committee initiatives. This, I hope, means that potential recruits are encouraged to apply, rather than discouraged, because they doubt their ability to fit in to our firm’s community.
What advice would you give to others looking to support and promote EDI within their firm?
Do whatever you can to encourage and develop open conversation. It is a simple piece of advice but truly the best I can give. Very few people know absolutely everything there is to know about EDI and because of the sensitivities attached to it, this can reduce engagement. Acknowledging this at the outset of your initiative and encouraging not just contributions, but questions, is a healthy way to promote EDI. EDI is a wide topic and it’s always evolving. These are difficult issues and there isn’t a clear path to success.
One of the methods I’ve found to be effective is sharing the leadership of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee among our members. I began by chairing the first few meetings and then, once I felt everyone had settled in, I asked someone else to chair the next meeting and the responsibility rotated amongst the Committee thereafter. I found this helpful for two main reasons: firstly, it prompted our less assertive committee members to participate more actively and, secondly, it changed the dynamic of our meetings and brought in different perspectives.
We are grateful to Natasha for sharing her thoughts and experiences and wish her and the Diversity and Inclusion Committee every success in achieving the objectives they have laid out. As Natasha suggests, there is clearly still room for improvement within the legal profession but the enthusiasm and proactivity of our members in tackling the challenges is going to fundamentally underpin progress towards equality, diversity and inclusion in the years to come.
In the spirit of encouraging further open conversations we are keen to hear from others within the Cambridgeshire legal community who are involved in EDI initiatives and willing to share their stories. If that’s you, please do contact admin@cambslaw.com so that we can feature you in a future edition!
Sarah Cooke
Principal Associate
Mills & Reeve
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