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The legal profession, our profession, is extraordinary. It gives its members a wealth of opportunities (and opportunities for wealth), as well as elevated social status. And the variety within it is astonishing. As lawyers, we are trusted advisers, skilled litigators and expert researchers, working as barristers, solicitors, legal executives, trainees, pupils, paralegals, judges, arbitrators and academics, either in-house, in private practice, as sole practitioners, for huge multi-national corporations, in local government, on the high street, advising ministers or, like Ofgem, helping a regulator to navigate legal challenges in pursuit of its public service purpose. Throughout our careers, we might move between roles, employers and areas of law, sometimes combining several at once.
We are all, probably, at least vaguely aware that access to the legal profession (similarly to access to legal services) is neither evenly nor fairly distributed among us and our fellow citizens. For example, the Bar Standards Board’s Diversity at the Bar Report 2024 suggests that around 9% of barristers have a declared disability, compared to a figure of 17.9% of the employed UK working age population. And while the profession is doing better at attracting women and candidates from ethnic and religious minorities, progression for those lawyers can be harder than for their male and white counterparts (for example, only 21% of KCs are women).
As lawyers occupying positions of responsibility in a prominent public sector organisation, we are acutely aware that we are gatekeepers to some of the opportunities that the legal profession has to offer.
That’s why Ofgem, like many organisations, has reviewed its recruitment and employment practices to ensure that we are a fair employer. We have name- and university-blind job applications, to counter ethnic, religious and class bias when shortlisting. In Ofgem’s Office of the General Counsel (OGC), we collect, review and act upon data on protected characteristics at each stage of our recruitment process, as well as in our appraisal, advancement and performance management processes.
Recently, we have established a reverse mentoring scheme in which lawyers from groups that are traditionally underrepresented in senior positions are paired with members of the OGC’s leadership team, with a view to sharing the reverse-mentor’s first-hand experiences of how their protected characteristics have affected and do affect them in the workplace.
As well as reviewing our position as an employer, we have looked upstream, to the next generation of lawyers. Solicitors Regulation Authority research suggests that 39% of people in the general population are from a working-class background, with 37% coming from a professional background, whereas only 17% of solicitors come from a working-class background, compared to 58% from a professional background. This suggests that the legal profession has a class problem – hardly a revelation!
Clearly, work experience can be an important introduction to a particular line of work, allowing students to familiarise themselves with how a modern office operates, to get a feel for whether a job might be right for them and, if so, to better understand how to qualify for it.
Ofgem has offices in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, in the east of Glasgow and in Cardiff. In each of those areas, we have paired with a state school with a high proportion of pupils entitled to free school meals, to offer legally minded students a week of work experience in the OGC.
Now that our work experience scheme has been running for several years, we are working with other regulators in those locations to expand its capacity. A drop in the ocean in tackling inequity in entry into the legal profession? Perhaps, but it should make a meaningful contribution to expanding the horizons of some young people in our communities and give them practical guidance on becoming a lawyer.
And there are other ways for us to influence the composition of the profession for the better: as a purchaser of legal services, for example.
We procure external legal advice from law firms through the Crown Commercial Services legal panel. That procurement process includes social value commitments, in which law firms must demonstrate, and report annually on, how they will increase representation from disabled people and tackle inequality in respect of women and underrepresented groups within the contract workforce.
Ofgem also instructs counsel and we recently looked at the barristers we tend to instruct. They are talented, toweringly clever lawyers who are committed to public service and have deep knowledge of Ofgem’s work and regulation, but they often share other characteristics, including ethnicity and disability status. This got us wondering whether we are unintentionally excluding barristers with other characteristics.
We decided to test this suspicion by organising a networking event to open up our work to a wider range of counsel. We did not limit who came along to the event – it was targeted at barristers unfamiliar but interested in our work, aiming to have a diverse attendee list.
Blackstone Chambers kindly hosted the event, and we had an excellent rostrum of speakers, consisting of Ofgem solicitors and barristers with experience of being instructed by us. We wanted not only to test the appetite at the Bar for working with us but also to communicate the complexity, significance and variety of advice that we seek, extending beyond public law and regulation, strictly speaking, to insolvency, commercial contracts, information rights and competition enforcement. We wanted to build enthusiasm for our work and provide an opportunity for barristers to speak with Ofgem lawyers about it.
The event was successful in promoting our work and broadening our base of counsel but it was less successful in attracting barristers with the sorts of characteristics that are underrepresented among the barristers we usually instruct.
So, we organised a second networking event, focusing on ethnicity and disability. This time, we sought attendees through relevant barristers’ networks, including at the Bar Council, the Inns and chambers, and invited barristers involved in disability advocacy groups at the Bar.
Through that event, we connected with barristers who have deep knowledge and on-point experience of areas of our practice and who have characteristics that differ from those of barristers whom we habitually instruct. On the evening of the event we reflected that the turnout was not what we had hoped for. However, since then, we have received expressions of interest from several dozen more barristers who had signed up to the event but could not, ultimately, attend.
So, what now? Using internal processes and awareness-raising, we will encourage Ofgem lawyers to instruct the barristers who have expressed interest in our work, we will build strong relationships with relevant networks in the profession and we are planning a series of lectures to familiarise barristers with what we do and the regulatory framework in which we do it.
While we are conscious that we are all more than our protected characteristics, it is important to try new approaches to tackling unfairness in access to, and opportunities within, this extraordinary profession of ours. The measures described above are our contribution to reaching that goal. And our lesson from all these initiatives is that not all of them will succeed at first, but we continue to develop new ways to pursue that goal.
James Peters is a Deputy Legal Director at Ofgem.
Sinead Murray joined Ofgem in 2021 as General Counsel and was previously a Director in the Government Legal Department.
The legal profession, our profession, is extraordinary. It gives its members a wealth of opportunities (and opportunities for wealth), as well as elevated social status. And the variety within it is astonishing. As lawyers, we are trusted advisers, skilled litigators and expert researchers, working as barristers, solicitors, legal executives, trainees, pupils, paralegals, judges, arbitrators and academics, either in-house, in private practice, as sole practitioners, for huge multi-national corporations, in local government, on the high street, advising ministers or, like Ofgem, helping a regulator to navigate legal challenges in pursuit of its public service purpose. Throughout our careers, we might move between roles, employers and areas of law, sometimes combining several at once.
We are all, probably, at least vaguely aware that access to the legal profession (similarly to access to legal services) is neither evenly nor fairly distributed among us and our fellow citizens. For example, the Bar Standards Board’s Diversity at the Bar Report 2024 suggests that around 9% of barristers have a declared disability, compared to a figure of 17.9% of the employed UK working age population. And while the profession is doing better at attracting women and candidates from ethnic and religious minorities, progression for those lawyers can be harder than for their male and white counterparts (for example, only 21% of KCs are women).
As lawyers occupying positions of responsibility in a prominent public sector organisation, we are acutely aware that we are gatekeepers to some of the opportunities that the legal profession has to offer.
That’s why Ofgem, like many organisations, has reviewed its recruitment and employment practices to ensure that we are a fair employer. We have name- and university-blind job applications, to counter ethnic, religious and class bias when shortlisting. In Ofgem’s Office of the General Counsel (OGC), we collect, review and act upon data on protected characteristics at each stage of our recruitment process, as well as in our appraisal, advancement and performance management processes.
Recently, we have established a reverse mentoring scheme in which lawyers from groups that are traditionally underrepresented in senior positions are paired with members of the OGC’s leadership team, with a view to sharing the reverse-mentor’s first-hand experiences of how their protected characteristics have affected and do affect them in the workplace.
As well as reviewing our position as an employer, we have looked upstream, to the next generation of lawyers. Solicitors Regulation Authority research suggests that 39% of people in the general population are from a working-class background, with 37% coming from a professional background, whereas only 17% of solicitors come from a working-class background, compared to 58% from a professional background. This suggests that the legal profession has a class problem – hardly a revelation!
Clearly, work experience can be an important introduction to a particular line of work, allowing students to familiarise themselves with how a modern office operates, to get a feel for whether a job might be right for them and, if so, to better understand how to qualify for it.
Ofgem has offices in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, in the east of Glasgow and in Cardiff. In each of those areas, we have paired with a state school with a high proportion of pupils entitled to free school meals, to offer legally minded students a week of work experience in the OGC.
Now that our work experience scheme has been running for several years, we are working with other regulators in those locations to expand its capacity. A drop in the ocean in tackling inequity in entry into the legal profession? Perhaps, but it should make a meaningful contribution to expanding the horizons of some young people in our communities and give them practical guidance on becoming a lawyer.
And there are other ways for us to influence the composition of the profession for the better: as a purchaser of legal services, for example.
We procure external legal advice from law firms through the Crown Commercial Services legal panel. That procurement process includes social value commitments, in which law firms must demonstrate, and report annually on, how they will increase representation from disabled people and tackle inequality in respect of women and underrepresented groups within the contract workforce.
Ofgem also instructs counsel and we recently looked at the barristers we tend to instruct. They are talented, toweringly clever lawyers who are committed to public service and have deep knowledge of Ofgem’s work and regulation, but they often share other characteristics, including ethnicity and disability status. This got us wondering whether we are unintentionally excluding barristers with other characteristics.
We decided to test this suspicion by organising a networking event to open up our work to a wider range of counsel. We did not limit who came along to the event – it was targeted at barristers unfamiliar but interested in our work, aiming to have a diverse attendee list.
Blackstone Chambers kindly hosted the event, and we had an excellent rostrum of speakers, consisting of Ofgem solicitors and barristers with experience of being instructed by us. We wanted not only to test the appetite at the Bar for working with us but also to communicate the complexity, significance and variety of advice that we seek, extending beyond public law and regulation, strictly speaking, to insolvency, commercial contracts, information rights and competition enforcement. We wanted to build enthusiasm for our work and provide an opportunity for barristers to speak with Ofgem lawyers about it.
The event was successful in promoting our work and broadening our base of counsel but it was less successful in attracting barristers with the sorts of characteristics that are underrepresented among the barristers we usually instruct.
So, we organised a second networking event, focusing on ethnicity and disability. This time, we sought attendees through relevant barristers’ networks, including at the Bar Council, the Inns and chambers, and invited barristers involved in disability advocacy groups at the Bar.
Through that event, we connected with barristers who have deep knowledge and on-point experience of areas of our practice and who have characteristics that differ from those of barristers whom we habitually instruct. On the evening of the event we reflected that the turnout was not what we had hoped for. However, since then, we have received expressions of interest from several dozen more barristers who had signed up to the event but could not, ultimately, attend.
So, what now? Using internal processes and awareness-raising, we will encourage Ofgem lawyers to instruct the barristers who have expressed interest in our work, we will build strong relationships with relevant networks in the profession and we are planning a series of lectures to familiarise barristers with what we do and the regulatory framework in which we do it.
While we are conscious that we are all more than our protected characteristics, it is important to try new approaches to tackling unfairness in access to, and opportunities within, this extraordinary profession of ours. The measures described above are our contribution to reaching that goal. And our lesson from all these initiatives is that not all of them will succeed at first, but we continue to develop new ways to pursue that goal.
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