UNITED KINGDOM
Opening Up Their Ranks
The central London headquar- ters of Linklaters is a scant 15 minutes’ walk from the working class borough of Hackney. But for
Chaimaa Elazrak, 15, who lives in Hackney with her Moroccan immigrant parents, the firm’s offices at One Silk Street
might just as well be light years away.
Eyes wide open, Chaimaa and four of
her schoolmates spent a week at Linklaters in October. They heard about the
different career paths that lawyers can
take, they learned how to conduct due
diligence over the Internet,
and they attended workshops on topics like presentation skills and corporate
social responsibility.
The internship at Linklaters was a preview of what
will happen at the roughly
three dozen U.K. firms that
have enlisted in a new legal
diversity initiative called
Prime. The project, which
officially kicks off in the
2012–13 academic year, is
the firms’ answer to criticism that too many of their
lawyers come from elite
backgrounds. The firms have
pledged to offer internships
to secondary school students
between the ages of 14 and
18 as a steppingstone to a
possible legal career, even if
they aren’t yet sure they will
go that route.
Neither of Chaimaa’s parents at-
tended college, but she wants to become
a lawyer. At Linklaters she learned that
she could concentrate her university
studies on French and sociology and
still become a corporate attorney. (In
the United Kingdom, college students
who want to pursue a legal career can
major in any subject—not just the law—
to prepare for eventual legal training
at a firm.) “It has been a good week,”
Chaimaa says. “I’ve learned that I can
be the master of my life.”
Prime is the U.K. bar’s response to
a widely publicized 2009 report by the
Panel on Fair Access to the Professions.
The study deplored the lack of social
mobility in several fields, including the
law. The report noted, for instance, that
half of solicitors and barristers had at-
tended fee-charging secondary schools,
compared to only 7 percent in the over-
all U.K. population.
Prime aims to provide 2,500 internships annually by 2015. Firms will recruit and hire their own interns, but
must abide by certain standards. For example, the number of interns that a firm
hosts each year must be equal to at least
half the number of trainees that it hires.
To qualify for an internship, students
must attend a state school (that is, a non-
inspire the program’s participants to
choose a legal career.
All five Magic Circle firms have
signed on to Prime, along with many
other large and small firms, all with offices in London, Edinburgh, or other
major U.K. cities. No U.S. firms were on
the initial list of 23 participants, though
at least three—Shearman & Sterling,
White & Case, and Baker & McKenzie—say they are reassessing their outreach programs to students in light of
the Prime opportunity.
Firms that don’t live up
to their Prime obligations
risk public embarrassment.
The Legal Services Board
will require them to publish
periodic data on their Web
sites detailing the socioeco-
nomic background of their
lawyers, and the National
Foundation for Educational
Research plans to audit and
report the firms’ progress.
But can a week of work
experience catapult under-
privileged teenagers into
the legal profession? Rich-
ard Moorhead, a professor
of law at Cardiff Univer-
sity, says that some lawyers
harbor doubts. “The public
view is that it is very much
a good thing,” Moorhead
says. “The private view is
that this may be just win-
dow dressing.” An approach
that might have had greater impact
would have been to offer internships at
the trainee level to a specific number
of disadvantaged students, according to
Moorhead, an expert on lawyers’ prac-
tices and ethics. That approach, however,
could have met resistance as “positive
discrimination,” he says.
Still, Prime’s backers are moving
ahead, envisioning a day when more
people like Chaimaa Elazrak choose to
become lawyers. Linklaters global di-
versity manager Felix Hebblethwaite
says of Prime, “This is something that
we think is really important, because
we see it as a commitment to our com-
munity.” Hebblethwaite adds, “We think
diverse teams make better decisions.”
—Joseph Rosenbloom
Criticized for being elitist, U.K. firms have
pledged to offer internships to students
from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Linklaters interns
Oniqa Siddiqa (left)
and Chaimaa Elazrak
fee-paying school, such as the one that
Chaimaa goes to in Hackney) and be
eligible for free school meals—or potentially be the first in their family to attend
a university. They do not have to profess
an interest in becoming a lawyer.
Work-experience internships for
secondary students have long been customary at many U.K. firms. An internship doesn’t necessarily lead to a job as
a lawyer, but it does help a student get
an offer from a firm. “It is quite difficult
to get into our profession unless you can
show work experience,” says David Morley, a senior partner at Allen & Overy
and the chairman of the Prime initiative.
“It is something you need to get through
connections, to a certain extent.” Morley
hopes that the Prime experience will
