It may come as no surprise that the legal sector has a bias towards middle-class candidates. A range of research has attributed this situation to the tendency of leading law firms to recruit graduates from those UK and international institutions with the most testing entry requirements, which themselves have a strong middle-class bias.

Though the impact of this strategy on their own diversity is increasingly recognised by many firms, it is widely justified on the basis that academic ability is a prerequisite for top-flight legal practice. Unequal access to educational advantage is, therefore, an important explanation of unequal access to legal careers.

However, my research over the past five years suggests this is not the only factor. Working-class candidates may also be rejected from law firms purely on the basis of how they look and sound.

Again, this emphasis is considered rational by many in the profession. After all, lawyers are in the business of providing advice and in consequence it makes sense that they should be articulate – or ‘well-spoken’. Yet it appears that for many individuals within leading City firms, the ability to clearly express oneself is considered seriously compromised when it is accompanied by any accent falling far outside the middle-class (and often southern) norm.

Senior practitioners often attribute responsibility for this situation to clients, who must feel able to trust their advisers. It appears that this trust is considered possible only when associated with a narrow set of cultural characteristics.

Many participants in this research also tacitly acknowledged the emphasis placed on reputation management when securing the position of elite law firms. This rests on several factors, including a belief that clients experience difficulty assessing and comparing the relative quality of advice they receive. Projecting the ‘right’ image therefore becomes an important proxy measure for some firms and can lead to a perception that living up to their ‘high-class’ reputation requires that they also field teams of lawyers who are of the ‘right class’.

Why does this issue matter? The trend identified here is of concern from not just a moral but also a commercial perspective. A dual rhetoric has developed. On one side are ‘traditionalists’, who believe that the costs and risks of recruiting from institutions where students are drawn from a wider range of socio-economic backgrounds are too high. However, a counter-argument is made by ‘modernists’ who have started to question the sector’s recruitment strategies. They say that current strategies are delivering a set of ‘cookie-cutter’ recruits, all with similar skills and aptitudes. They argue that graduates who have benefited from long-term educational advantage are less ‘hungry’ and perhaps at times less talented than peers who have been forced to overcome more obstacles.

Others suggest that though the two traits are by no means mutually exclusive, focusing heavily on academic ability does not always deliver the most commercial lawyers.

The business case for diversity is often cited but is often bogus. However, in this case perhaps the most obvious demonstration of the benefits of difference is the knowledge that many highly successful senior leaders across the sector come from less privileged backgrounds, but would not have gained entry to their firms today on the basis of their academic qualifications. At the widest scale, reducing unequal educational outcomes according to relative privilege is one means by which this issue could be addressed.

Of course, law firms cannot achieve this alone. The outreach programmes many have adopted are unlikely to make a significant dent in the sector’s middle-class bias if they are not accompanied by much deeper critical reflection about what a City lawyer can look and sound like. This will take courage and is undoubtedly challenging for a still relatively conservative profession.

Dr Louise Ashley is a research fellow at the Centre for Professional Service Firms, Cass Business School, part of City University London