Neil Rose reviews the findings of the Law Society’s Annual statistical report and reveals some positive, and some less positive, trends for women and ethnic minority solicitors




Though it is now just a matter of a few years until women become the majority in the solicitors’ profession, it may take a little longer before there are calls to form the Association of Male Solicitors to represent the new minority, and actively oppose discrimination, as the Association of Women Solicitors (AWS) currently does for its members.



The Law Society’s recently published annual statistical report shows that women still have some way to go to match men in status (see [2007] Gazette, 8 March, 1). While 40% of male solicitors are partners, the figure falls to 18% of female solicitors. The old excuse that this is largely down to women only entering the profession in large numbers relatively recently looks shaky against the finding that 60% of male solicitors with between ten and 19 years’ post-qualification experience are partners or sole practitioners, compared to 40% of similarly qualified women.



Nonetheless, the growth of women in the profession has been staggering. There were just 619 women with practising certificates as recently as 1967 – last year the figure was 44,393, almost 43% of the record 104,543 practising solicitors. In the past decade, the number of female practising solicitors has more than doubled, while the number of male solicitors has gone up by just 29%.



Numerical parity will be achieved shortly – and at the same rate of growth over the next decade, 54% of the profession will be female by 2016. And there is every chance this rate of growth will continue as almost two-thirds of law undergraduates and 62% of new trainees were women. This will arguably also help academic standards in the profession – come the end of their law degrees, female students are more likely than their male counterparts to achieve a first or upper second.



The demography also highlights a problem in waiting for the profession – what Dawn Dixon, until recently the AWS chairwoman, calls the ‘maternity gap’. Almost half of solicitors in private practice are up to nine years’ qualified, and two-thirds of those (more than 21,000 solicitors) are women. Many of these may be thinking of having children, potentially leaving firms with a need for a level of cover that is not available. This is an issue the profession has to work out now, Ms Dixon asserts, rather than trying to address it once it has happened. ‘There are a lot more women lawyers who want children than partnership,’ she says.



The in-house sector could be even more severely affected, as women, perhaps tellingly, gravitate away from private practice – almost half of solicitors in the employed and other sectors are women, compared to 40% in private practice.



There are similar disparities – although not quite as marked – for ethnic minority solicitors. The provision of information on ethnicity by practising certificate holders is not compulsory (although the vast majority give it), and it is estimated that a fraction more than 9% of practising certificate holders were from ethnic minorities last year, up from 8.7% in 2005, both of which are higher than the figure for the general population (slightly less than 8%). The report observes that the proportion of ethnic minority women in the profession (12%) is ‘notably higher’ than that of men (7%). More than half of ethnic minority solicitors are Asian.



But the figures on partnership reveal a problem here too. Some 22% of ethnic minority solicitors in private practice are partners, compared to 32% of white Europeans. The proportion reverses itself for sole practitioners, which is seen by some as a sign that ethnic minority solicitors feel a greater need to set up shop on their own to progress.



The continued growth of ethnic minority representation in the profession – in 1998, for example, it was just 5% of practising solicitors – is again bolstered by the make-up of the student cohort. A third of law undergraduates and almost a quarter of those enrolling with the Law Society for post-graduate study in 2005-6 were from ethnic minorities, a figure that continues to fall as they near qualification, but is still around double the 9% figure for the practising profession.



However, one key message is that partnership for all solicitors, regardless of gender or ethnicity, is becoming harder to achieve for reasons that are not explored in the report but are becoming increasingly well known – such as the financial fragility of some smaller firms, and the drive by larger firms to boost their headline profits per partner (achieved as much by keeping a cap on the number of partners as anything else).



Overall, 31% of solicitors were partners last year, a significant drop from 42% in 2001. And men and women have been hit to roughly the same extent, the number of male solicitors who are partners falling from 52% of 40% over the five years, and from 24% to 18% for women. Meanwhile, gearing is obviously going up; whereas in 2001 there were two admitted staff per principal across the profession, the figure in 2006 spiralled to 2.8:1.



This is also in the context of a gradual decline in the overall number of law firm partnerships, which has slipped below 9,000 (a fall of 3.3% over five years). The number of offices these firms have dropped 11% over the same period to 11,445. Interestingly, however, the number of incorporated firms – a practice structure that has been largely shunned by the profession until now – has grown dramatically in that time, from 284 to 941.



In total, English and Welsh solicitors are employed in almost 20,000 different organisations around the world.



For those looking to launching a new firm, the areas to hang a shingle are the East Midlands, north-east, and Yorkshire and Humberside, where the proportion of law firms to the population they serve is most out of kilter (for example, slightly more than 8% of the population lives in the East Midlands, which is home to a fraction fewer than 5% of law firms). More than a quarter of solicitors’ firms are based in London, serving 14% of the England and Wales population &150; but this figure is distorted by the large number of practices in the capital serving the business community.



The report records just 25 firms that have 81 or more partners – 19 of them in London – and yet 22% of all solicitors, 18,000 in total, work for those practices. Extended to the 91 firms that have between 26 and 80 partners, and the figure rises to almost 40%.



The law’s appeal to students remains great. More than 21,000 students applied to study the subject at university in 2005 (the last year for which figures are available), of whom around two-thirds were successful. Meanwhile, after a period where the number of solicitors qualifying without law degrees rose steadily, the figures are dropping back again – 21% in 2000/1, 18% in 2005/6.



Nonetheless, many choose not to take the academic study of law onto qualification, but should there be a surge of interest in doing so, there will now be more than enough capacity to accommodate them. The report reveals a sharp increase in the number of legal practice course (LPC) places that were made available last year – 10,325 full-time places (up from 8,843 in 2005) and 2,948 part-time places (up from 2,498). But in 2006, there were 8,262 students enrolled on the LPC, indicating a good number of half-full courses.



The rise is largely down to the College of Law’s new City branch (with 1,000 full-time places), BPP’s new Waterloo branch in London (252 places), plus new courses at Plymouth University and the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.



An attempt in the 1990s by the Law Society to freeze the number of LPC places, for fear that there were getting out of kilter with the number of available training contracts, was short-lived and faced problems with competition law. But the fear has not gone away and the expansion of places will only make it worse, because traineeships are not increasing. There were 5,751 registered in 2005-6, just 19 more than the year before.



A decade ago, it was not uncommon to hear tales of LPC students giving up on becoming solicitors after literally hundreds of unsuccessful applications for training contracts. It could do little good to the profession’s reputation if this situation recurs.



But whatever shape the profession takes in years to come, at least the provision of WC facilities at Law Society headquarters in Chancery Lane – which was an issue in 1922 when women were allowed into the profession – should not be a problem. Back when Carrie Morrison became the first women solicitor, the Law Society Council debated the problem and voted to convert a coal store into a ladies’ lavatory.