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Diversity and inclusion

We want to recruit the most talented and ambitious people to work at Allen & Overy. It doesn't matter where they have come from or what their background is: we look for their skills, experience and potential. In return, we provide an inclusive and collaborative environment, where our people can achieve their full potential and make a valuable contribution to Allen & Overy's success.

What do we mean by diversity & inclusion?

So what have we been doing?

Staff networks

Monitoring progress and statistics

What do we mean by diversity & inclusion?

We recognise that people are different – in terms of visible things like age, gender, ethnicity and physical appearance, as well as underlying things like religion, nationality, social background and education.

Diversity is valued here. Everyone has the opportunity to join us, develop with us and fulfill their potential with us.

We want to:

Create a culture where everyone feels valued and, included and respected;
bring together teams of people with differing and complementary skills, ideas and experiences;
ensure people from diverse backgrounds feel want to develop their careers with us;
use the diversity of our people to develop creative solutions for our clients;
support the evolution of a legal profession that is truly accessible to everyone, regardless of their background.

These are the standards we set ourselves and we regularly review what we are doing to see if we are achieving them.

So what have we been doing?

Broadening access to the legal profession

We think that the legal profession should be accessible to everyone. We aim to:

widen the talent pool from which we select the brightest and best people
give talented students the opportunity and aspiration for a career in law
have a workforce that reflects the diversity of the locations in which we operate.

The following activities are highlights from some of our offices.

In London

We run work placements and skills events to support students from non-traditional backgrounds to gain the skills and experience to make it easier to apply to firms like Allen & Overy.

We provide bursaries to high-achieving students from non-traditional backgrounds, to support them through their university education.

We participate in events and programmes which raise the aspirations of students from ethnic minorities and socially-disadvantaged communities and encourage them to apply to university and to consider a career in law. Examples include the Legal Launch Pad and Today's Children Tomorrow's Lawyers (programmes run by the Black Lawyers Directory), CSET Summer Schools, TARGET Chances Law and Pure Potential.

We are a founder sponsor of the Pathways to Law programme, supported by the Sutton Trust and run by the College of Law, which aims to increase the educational opportunities which can lead to a career in law for young people from non-privileged backgrounds. We provide a week’s work placement at our London office for students on this programme and contribute to ongoing development of the Pathways to Law programme.

The Allen & Overy Smart Start Experience gives over 100 disadvantaged young people from across London a valuable insight into the world of business and the skills needed to succeed, spending a week at our London office.

Each year we run an in-depth Work Experience Week for 12 law students from low-income families at London universities and a two-week work placement for high achieving students from non-traditional backgrounds at the University of Westminster.

Since 2007 we have participated in the London LGBT job fair.

In the recruitment year 2010/11 we will be visiting and working with 40 UK and Irish universities.

Our current trainee solicitor population attended 47 universities between them.

Our current trainee solicitor intake is: 59 per cent female and 41 per cent male.

23 per cent of our current trainee intake are from an ethnic minority background.

Please follow this link for information on our UK specific diversity metrics.

In New York

We support the recruitment and retention of minority candidates by sponsoring several student minority organizations and recruiting at various minority job fairs, including Vault Minority Job Fair and the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) Job Fair.

We provide in-house and external training for our recruiters to raise awareness of the importance of recruiting from a wider range of law schools.

We host a summer internship program targeted at ethnic minority students or those with disadvantaged backgrounds. This is a great opportunity for the students to gain hands-on work experience in the legal world, and an excellent chance for us to reap the many benefits that come from building strong mentoring relationships and deepening our community ties.

We are signatories to the American Bar Association's Statement of Diversity Principles.

We have a Diversity Committee in the New York office made up of partners, associates and support staff, all of whom volunteer their time to meet regularly to hear issues and review our policies and diversity initiatives.

In Amsterdam

One of Amsterdam’s priorities is to set targets in order to stimulate female capital to reach the top. With this in mind Allen & Overy Amsterdam signed the ‘Charter Talent at the Top’ in 2008. The Charter is established as a result of close cooperation between the Confederation of Netherlands Industry and Employers (VNO-NCW), the Dutch Trade Union Federation (FNV), the Social and Economic Council (SER) and representatives of corporate business, the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) and the Ministry of Economic Affairs (EZ). The basic principle of the Charter is that organisations are responsible for the required cultural shift at the top of their organisations. Part of the Charter is a catalogue of proven national and international best practices in the area of diversity policy. In May 2010, we received an award for the most distinct and clear business case. In addition to this, we also aim to increase the number of women partners and counsels by preparing female senior associates for partnership and by using role models to show that being (a full time) partner and mother is possible.

We organised a Diversity Survey for our legal staff in addition to the You Count results on diversity.

We make an active contribution to the Giving Back program. The Giving Back Foundation helps talented and motivated students of different cultural backgrounds by offering them an individual coach and a providing them with a programme comprising of workshops, excursions, meetings and other activities. We have 14 coaches in the Amsterdam office for these students.

We also contribute to the diversity programme of the Netherlands Bar Association.

In Hong Kong

A key aspect of our recruitment policy is to attract strong local talent with local language skills and experience who are interested in long term careers not only in their home country but throughout the Asian Region. The office offers cultural orientation training to familiarise newcomers to Hong Kong with the diverse aspects of the Chinese culture. The office provides ongoing Mandarin, Cantonese and English language lessons, free of charge to staff members, to assist people in understanding some basic local customs and the culture.

Allen & Overy Hong Kong has been voted 'Employer of Choice' in Hong Kong and Singapore by readers of Asian Legal Business and has been awarded 'caring company' status for the fourth year running for their activities such as mentoring and other support projects with disadvantaged groups.

Culture of inclusion and respect

We want everyone at Allen & Overy to fulfill their potential in an inclusive and respectful environment.

Our values provide the basis for how our people should interact with each other and with our clients.

Diversity Week

In March 2007 we held our first Diversity Week at Allen & Overy in London, to encourage people to think about what diversity and inclusion means and to raise awareness in an informative and entertaining way. Hundreds of our staff (and some of our clients) attended the events run by experts on a wide range of topics:

TV sports presenter Gabby Logan talked about success in a man's world and how she combines her career as a successful TV sports presenter and life as a busy mum.
Actor Simon Callow spoke about his life as a gay actor, including answering questions from the floor about the impact on his family when he ‘came out’.
Views on the future of the legal profession were discussed at a networking evening for the Black Lawyers Directory.
Students from Bethnal Green Technology College choreographed and presented a pageant and fashion show, distributing food from different national cuisines, which they had prepared in our kitchens.
For our working parents we ran practical workshops on teaching children to read. Award-winning travel broadcaster and journalist Sarah Tucker spoke about inspiring family holidays.

Improving flexibility

We are continuously looking at ways to improve flexibility around ways of working for all of our people. We introduced flexible working policies in 2001 and more than 11 per cent of our employees work part-time, with many more taking the opportunity to work flexibly on a full-time basis. In 2010 we launched an innovative approach to flexible partnership.

The latest technology makes it possible to work outside the office, and records in London alone suggest that every month around 20 per cent of our people work from home.

Taking time out

Our Time Out policy allows people to take unpaid leave to pursue other activities, such as travel, study, writing or caring for a relative. We also allow extended holidays overseas and time off between international transfers.

We also offer career breaks of up to three years to allow staff to take time out, for example to care for children or undertake further study.

Staff networks

A&Out

Formed in 2006, we have an active LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) forum group for our staff called A&Out, which provides support and guidance to LGBT partners and staff, as well as an opportunity to socialise and network with others, internally and externally with the LGBT community. For example, in 2008 A&Out held a summer party to provide a networking opportunity for LGBT networks from client organisations and other law firms. Allen & Overy is a member of InterLaw and plays an active part in the forum’s panel discussions, seminars, and networking events. Since 2006, we have been a member of Stonewall's Diversity Champions programme.

Parents@A&O

In London we have several initiatives to support working parents, such as emergency childcare facilities, specialist coaching for women going on maternity leave and lunchtime parenting seminars. In 2008 we launched parents@A&O, a virtual networking tool for all our working parents globally, which enables them to share ideas and advice on parenting issues and access relevant information.

Carers@A&O

We recognise that it can be challenging to juggle work with caring responsibilities and have created an intranet site that provides advice, support and useful information for carers at Allen & Overy. We also run regular lunchtime seminars for staff with caring responsibilities..

Monitoring progress and statistics

We want to keep track of how we are doing, so:

We conduct regular surveys to find out what our people think. We take the results seriously and use them to drive change in the way we do things.
We believe that benchmarking against other organisations in and outside the legal profession is a good way to monitor our progress against achieving our diversity and inclusion aims. For example:
- We have participated in the Black Solicitors' Network Diversity League Table for the last three years.
- We have participated in research into women in leadership for the Lehman Brothers Centre for Women in Business at the London Business School. We received special mention for good practice in key areas around increasing flexibility and parents in the workplace for our initiatives such as maternity coaching, parenting seminars, career breaks and emergency childcare. We have also participated in research by Working Families.

Our activities have been recognised externally:

We won the Law Society Award for Excellence in Equality & Diversity in 2007 for our work on diversity and inclusion.
In January 2008 we won the Lawyer HR Awards 2008 for Most Effective Diversity Programme.
In the 2006 FT Innovation Awards we received an award for our work on supporting working parents.
We were ranked Best In Sector for Law in a survey on maternity and paternity benefits carried out by the Guardian in August 2007.

By monitoring our diversity statistics we can track our progress and determine where we are having an impact. Some of our metrics include:

Gender profile

Worldwide employees at 31 May 2010: