10 years of removing barriers
At Accutrainee, diversity has never been an initiative or something we do alongside our core business. Diversity IS our business. In 2012 when we created our model, a training solution to remove existing barriers and give solicitors another way to qualify, we did this driven by the need to diversify the trainee pool, to create opportunities for great graduates in a market where it seemed increasingly hard to do so. At the same time, we wanted to ensure legal services providers had access to this diverse talent pool. From these two market forces, Accutrainee was born.
And in the past 10 years we have helped 100’s of trainees to qualify as solicitors. Our track record for diversity is solid with 50% of our current cohort identifying as BAME and 65% of candidates who come from outside of the Russell Group.
But we can and need to do better and so can the UK legal sector.
Diversity matters
We could devote this entire blog to the importance of diversity in business. Variety of perspective, higher innovation, better decision-making, increased creativity, reduced employee turnover, better company regulation, improved hiring results, higher employee engagement all leading to increased profits – just some of the benefits to workplace diversity.
We repeat, diversity matters!
Yet we continue to battle against a lack of diversity in the legal profession.
As with all change, approaching diversity and inclusion in a meaningful way can feel overwhelming, especially for smaller legal service businesses or in-house legal departments. Where do you start with action?
But if we all, as members of the legal profession, commit to do just one thing, there is such power in collective action, in the little and often. We all have a responsibility and the power to use our business privilege and platform to help create a more diverse legal profession.
A lot of the businesses we speak with at Accutrainee are under pressure to do more with less. As always, we wanted to remove barriers and make it easy for legal leaders to do their part. So over the past months, we have been proudly working up our new scholarship programme which enables sponsors to easily support diversity and inclusion in the legal industry whilst having access to exceptional diverse talent.
Accutrainee Scholarship Programme
Our scholarship programme is more than work experience. It has been created to offer deserving candidates from low social economic backgrounds the opportunity to have their solicitor examinations paid for whilst gaining the necessary work experience in an in-house legal department or a law firm to help them achieve their dream of becoming a qualified solicitor. Our law firm and in-house legal department sponsors contribute to the cost of SQE fees and exams and for the placement of a highly talented and motivated legal resource, who is fully supported by Accutrainee’s quality development programme. In other words, we’ll take care of all the training, mentoring and regulatory requirements, so our sponsoring law firms and in-house teams can benefit from highly motivated and diverse trainees.
Our training programme is so successful, a huge percentage of our clients decide to keep their Accutrainees on once qualified. So this is an investment in talent for the long term.
