Breaking the barriers - there are now more disabled people working as solicitors than ever before, largely thanks to new technology which means that physical barriers are becoming increasingly irrelev

THE DISABILTIY DISCRIMINATION ACT 1995 IS HAVING A BI G IMPACT ON LAW FIRMS EMPLOYMENT PRACTICES, SAYS ROBERT VERKAIKMany people labour under the misconception that the statue symbolising justice which stands atop the Old Bailey is blindfolded.

The fact is that, observed from the ground, the crown appears to fall over the eyes giving the impression of a blindfold - hence the saying 'justice is blind'.Eleanor Williams, chairman of the Group for Solicitors with Disabilities (GSD) says: 'That's just typical.

People have seen justice as disabled and thought that this was something which was worthy of comment.

This just goes to show that disability is nothing more than a "perception" phenomenon.

Justice is in fact doing a good job and her disability or not is irrelevant.'John Wall was the first blind person to obtain judicial office.

He now sits as a deputy Chancery Master and is also chairman of the Royal National Institute for the Blind as well as joint secretary of the Society of Visually Impaired Lawyers.Mr Wall estimates there are now around 100 lawyers who are visually impaired, compared with just 20 or 30 in 1954 when he first qualified.

Although there are no figures on the numbers of disabled people working as solicitors, the GSD has nearly 400 members.

Next year the GSD celebrates its tenth anniversary.

During its existence it has not only been prominent in the campaign to raise awareness of the issues facing lawyers with disabilities but has also demonstrated to law firms that practical problems associated with disability can be overcome.Some of the GSD's members have sensory and physical disabilities, but many people whose disabilities are less readily apparent are working as solicitors.

These include those with hidden disabilities - for example dyslexia and epilepsy - and mental disabilities.Many solicitors with disabilities have become disabled after qualifying, and have found it relatively easy to continue practising since they already had clients in place and, often, were already partners.

Others have been disabled from birth or childhood and have had to fight harder to be regarded by the legal establishment as solicitors first, and disabled second.

It is also common for disabled people to become interested in the law through personal experience of pursuing a personal injury claim, or a discrimination claim.David Ruebain is the head of education and disability at law firm David Levene & Co, which employs six lawyers and support staff with disabilities.

He believes there are many more lawyers with disabilities employed in the public sector than in private practice.'It has been local and central government which have been most committed to incorporating non-discrimination polices and have been more prepared to adopt flexible working practices.

By and large people feel more at home there,' he says.Mr Ruebain, a member of the Law Society's mental health and disability sub-committee, is also an executive trustee of the Disability Discrimination Act Representation and Advice Project which offers pro bono legal representation for disabled people.

His advice to private practice firms thinking about taking on a lawyer with disabilities is to talk to the lawyer concerned first.

'Disabled lawyers will know what they need most and will have thought about the solutions to their problems,' he says.

The idea that employers should rush out and seek 'expert advice' first is not always the best course of action, argues Mr Ruebain.Ms Williams, whose first job was with a local council, agrees.

'The cardinal rule of good practice when dealing with disabled people is to listen to what they need,' she says.Private practice firms can no longer ignore the impact of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 on their practices.

On 1 December the employment provisions of the Act will be extended from employers with over 20 staff to employers employing 15 or more people (see page 32).

Many more small law firms will then fall within its requirements that they should avoid making inappropriate assumptions about what disabled solicitors can and cannot do, and that they should make reasonable adjustment to workplaces to accommodate such solicitors.Martin Edwards, head of employment law at Liverpool firm Mace & Jones, says: 'I think there's an understandable but mistaken tendency to assume it's impractical to make adjustments which a tribunal might think were reasonable.' Only last month, the Employment Appeals Tribunal (EAT) allowed an appeal (see [1998] Gazette, 11 November, 30) from a man with cerebral palsy whose offer of a job had been withdrawn because his potential employer had believed it was unable to make appropriate arrangements for his needs, which included considerable assistance in using the lavatory.

The EAT felt that the potential employer might not have sufficiently pursued the course of applying for government funding for a part-time carer.Mr Edwards says: 'The EAT has recently urged tribunals to refer to the relevant provisions of the code of practice and other guidance issued by the government in conjunction with the Act.

In practical terms that's also a good thing for law firms to be doing.'Many of the practical barriers to being a disabled solicitor are disappearing as new technology (see pages 25 and 26) develops to allow people with physical and sensory disabilities to use computers more easily.

Computers, in their turn, have the ability to make the idea of physical barriers to legal practice redundant.Many law firms are not aware that the cost of computer equipment for the disabled, and of many of the more practical and cultural adaptations that firms need to make when employing disabled solicitors - such as wheelchair ramps and facilities for dogs for the blind can be financed by a number of grants and special funding packages.

The statutory established programme is the one run by the govern-ment's Assistance at Work scheme.

This provides cash help to employers, including law firms, for the use of screen readers, wheelchair ramps and transport and other equipment.

In addition, the government's placing assessment and counselling team (PACT) provides disability employment advisers.However, Ms Williams's experience has been that in practice, law firms do not always pay more than lip service to anti-discrimination law.

When applying for training contracts, Ms Williams - who is physically disabled - turned down some interviews because she believed that the firms in question were only making token gestures towards lawyers with disabilities.

Reading between the lines of many invitations for interviews, Ms Williams thought that some firms were frightened of 'this dynamo whirling in'.Once she was in practice Ms Williams - who is now an in-house lawyer with Remploy - quickly discovered that she could not just turn up for court and expect everything to run smoothly.

Instead she had to plan her arrival carefully.

At the local county court there is a steep flight of stairs.

'I had a car phone installed and rang the court clerk and said "I'm in the car park, come and get me", 'she recalls.DAN BINDMAN LOOKS AT THE RANGE OF EQUIPMENT AVAILABLE TO HELP DISABLED PEOPLE TO WORK EFFECTIVELY AS SOLICI TORSOne of the undisputed successes of the information revolution is that it has helped to level the playing field of employment for people with a variety of disabilities.

Solicitors, as with others whose work is largely document-based, have been in a good position to capitalise on a proliferation of computer products designed for workers with physical and sensory impairments.In fact, the technology now available is so sophisticated that desktop computers - arguably the single tool essential for a solicitor to practise - are within the reach of virtually everybody, however severe their physical disability.

'What you want in a lawyer is a fine mind.

If their brain is capable of understanding legal concepts, there is no reason why the body should stop them,' says solicitor John Willis, who worked in private practice for 12 years and now heads a charity devoted to the social, residential and vocational integration of disabled people.Mr Willis, who was born with stumps instead of arms and legs, also believes that advances in IT have played a part - together with the changed climate brought about by the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 - in pulling the rug from under prejudiced employers.

'There is less reason for the mental barriers of discrimination to be there in the first place,' he says.As well as the growing market in IT hardware and software products designed to meet the needs of disabled people, global changes in the way that IT is used in commerce and the law have positive consequences.

The growing use of e-mail in everyday correspondence has been a boon to deaf people in particular, reducing reliance on the fax machine and providing another alternative to the telephone.Being able to access legal resources via the Internet has reduced the need for physical mobility.IT products of use to solicitors with disabilities - 'adaptive and alternative technologies' in the jargon of support services - fall into two categories: hardware and software.On the hardware side, many blind people use Braille printers, known as embossers, that enable PCs to produce paper documents in Braille.

They cost upwards of £3,500 and can be used in conjunction with Braille translation software.

Other hardware includes mouse-type pointing devices, such as touch pads and trackballs (or trackerballs, which are static, upside down mice), and a variety of keyboards - which on their own can activate all the functions of software without the need for a mouse.According to John Willis, 'vision control' technology, now under development, can even offer mouse-pointer functions to people whose only power of movement is the ability to move their eyeballs.

The device, which gives the user access to the entire range of a computer's functions, could cost as little as £3,500.On the software side, at the most basic level there are software 'accessibility' utilities built into the Windows and Apple Mac operating systems to enable extensive modification of their functions.

These include such things as 'sticky keys' which cut down number of keystrokes needed to activate a programme, useful to someone with restricted movement.

Other utilities include being able to change colours, font and icon sizes, possibly sufficient for someone with a moderate visual impairment.On the specialist software market, there are a number of products aimed primarily at blind and visually impaired people.

These include screen readers that read electronic text out loud through a computer's loudspeakers using speech synthesisers.

There are at least eight different brands of this ty pe, ranging in price from £200 to about £2,000.

Some work in conjunction with software that converts text into Braille, which can then be printed or read using a Braille display device.For those with some residual sight, there are several software applications that magnify whatever appears on a computer screen, such as text or pictures.Solicitor John Wall, joint secretary of the Society of Visually Impaired Lawyers (SOVIL), who is blind and describes himself as 'not terribly high-tech', says that for him, the main advantage of a computer is that anything stored on it, whether first scanned in from a paper document or otherwise, can be printed out in Braille.

Mr Wall qualified more than 40 years ago.

He recently abandoned his Braille typewriter and is soon to start using the Internet.Perhaps the software most widely used by disabled lawyers is voice recognition (VR).

Prices for VR applications have dropped dramatically and their huge demands on computer speed and memory can now be handled by relatively low-cost desktop machines.

Being able to write documents and control the menu and other key functions of a personal computer by voice alone have obvious advantages for those with restricted movements or visual impairments.

The availability of legal language 'modules' for VR programmes is a particular aid to solicitors.'VR helps level the playing field by giving access to computers to people who would find working difficult without them,' says Nuala Davis, a consultant at AbilityNet, a charity dedicated to assisting disable people gain access to technology.

She adds that solicitors, many of whom already have dictation skills, are in a particularly good position to exploit VR's benefits.

There are disadvantages, however, she says, such as the frustration involved in 'training' the software to understand your voice.

Also, although VR is more accurate than it used to be, corrections still have to be made to the finished document.

Mr Willis began using VR software in 1994, when it was in its early stages.

He points out that while VR can still be frustrating to use, it has improved in the past year or so and 'is another valuable weapon in your armoury' to control the computer.The expense of buying the latest IT equipment can place it beyond the reach of some disabled people and might discourage potential employers.

But state funding is available to meet most of the costs incurred in the workplace, through the Government Employment Service's Access to Work scheme.The Solicitors Benevolent Scheme (SBA) has also made significant grants for IT for solicitors with disabilities.

SBA secretary Nick Lorimer said the trustees had approved grants worth £10,000 in the last 12 months.

The latest grant, made earlier this month, went towards providing a solicitor who has the use only of one hand, with a laptop computer equipped with VR software.

Others have gone to solicitors with particularly debilitating conditions, including multiple sclerosis and motor neurone disease, Mr Lorimer said.CASE STUDIES BY DIANA BENTLEY-- CASE STUDY ONE: KATRIONA TAYLOR AND LAWRENCE GRAHAM'I am a solicitor of the 1990s,' says Katriona Taylor, a commercial assistant solicitor with City firm Lawrence Graham, referring to the way in which she uses technology in her legal practice.

At the age of seven Ms Taylor was found to have a type of macular dystrophy, a progressive eye disorder which resulted in her being partially sighted.'Usually no-one realises,' says Katriona, who does not wear glasses or appear to have limited sight.

'I can see printed text, but normally it's not large enough for me to read.' At the age of 18, Katriona decided to change her study methods by finding and using technology which would help her, in spite of there being no financial assistance available for that purpose.At both Brunel University where she studied law, and at Nottingham Trent Law School, where she gained a distinction in her LPC, she was treated like an average student, taking notes on a laptop which had enlarged text and voice software by which the text could be read back.

At both institutions she was allowed additional reading time in exams and given questions on computer disk.

'Generally I use the computer as my pen and paper,' says Ms Taylor who can type rapidly and listen to text read back at speed.Having gained work experience in firms while at university, Ms Taylor joined Lawrence Graham as a trainee solicitor.

Recently qualified, she has remained at Lawrence Graham, specialising in intellectual property, advertising, sales promotion and direct selling.Her response to being partially sighted at work is to be extremely organised and to concentrate on preparation.

'For example, I get documents from clients in advance of meetings,' she says.

'I can get precedents on screen or if something's on paper I use a scanner to put it onto computer and read it with the speech output software.'It is unusual for practical problems to arise in Ms Taylor's conferences.

'If long documents are presented to me for the first time at meetings they can't be read then anyway, and if it is a short document, its contents can be summarised,' she says.

Notes are taken directly onto a laptop.

Katriona notes that people who are not forced by a disability to use technology often do not make the most of the technology which is available.

Ms Taylor - who is the joint secretary of the Society for Visually Impaired Lawyers, an independent organisation with around 100 members which mainly operates out of Lawrence Graham - tells clients about her sight limitations and has not experienced any negative responses.

'Clients don't have a problem so long as the work is done,' she says.

'It's the quality of advice which matters and I'm interested in providing clients with the best service.'Her particular needs have made her work in different ways.

'People often assimilate information by skimming something several times whereas I tend to read things once more thoroughly and have developed a good memory,' she says.Ms Taylor also uses readers.

These are law graduates who read material to her out loud and manage files.

'They are another pair of eyes for me but it also gives would-be trainees good experience,' she says.

The Department of Education and Employment's Access to Work scheme funded the personal computer and software Katriona uses.

It also meets reader expenses, which are supplemented by Lawrence Graham.Obtaining information which assists people with disabilities to work in an office environment is not as easy as it should be, according to Ms Taylor.

'You have to go out and find it,' she says.

She also comments that solicitors are not generally experienced in working with colleagues who have slightly different working methods, although she maintains the Disability Discrimination Act may raise people's awareness generally.-- CASE STUDY TWO: CAROL MCGUIRE AND THOMAS ANDREWS & PARTNERSA matrimonial law specialist, Carol McGuire had practised for over ten years and was a partner in Thomas Andrews & Partners in Wrexham, North Wales when she was diagnosed as having syringomyelia, a rare form of brain disease.Characte rised by the growth of the brain into the spinal cord, the disease had to be arrested by surgery, which forced her to take several months off work.

Surgery was successful but Ms McGuire has been left with continuing sensory problems - such as an inability to distinguish between hot and cold - damage on the right side of her body, mobility problems and constant pain.Although many syringomyelia sufferers do not work after the disease develops, Ms McGuire has continued to practise actively.

'I had to work around it.

It was too easy to give up,' she says.Support for her new needs, including necessary alterations to working patterns, has been readily forthcoming from her three partners.

'There has been no impact on my costs and the situation has probably made them more sensitive to the needs of disabled people generally.

The office is now better equipped for them,' she says.

She also noticed that solicitors practising family law are used to being sympathetic towards the needs of others.Two experienced clerical assistants attend court on Ms McGuire's behalf as she is unable to do so.

'It's too painful for me to sit for any length of time and I can't carry heavy things to court,' she says.Now she works from home several days a week and has noticed a beneficial effect from this alteration in working habits.

'My work is very paper-orientated and working from home you can apply total concentration which helps you produce better quality work,' she says.Clients are usually unaware of her disability.

'Mostly the clients don't notice anything and I don't tell them as the disease isn't obvious,' she says.

Having had an established reputation before her illness, and relying on many referrals, she is concerned that drawing attention to the disease may affect people's confidence.Great determination on her part has been necessary to adapt to her new condition and continue to practise successfully.

'My first year back at work was depressing,' she says, 'but I was determined about continuing on and you learn to live life in a different way.' Happily there have been no drawbacks for her practice or her partners.-- CASE STUDY THREE: JONATHAN FOGERTY AND PANNONE & PARTNERSA swimming accident at school when he was 14 years old left Jonathan Fogerty partially paralysed.

But his involvement in the resulting personal injury claim, which lasted for several years, generated an interest in the law and prompted his choice of career.

'I watched the lawyers handling my case and became interested and thought, "I can do that", 'he says.Although he has good use of his arms and some movement in his hands and fingers, Mr Fogerty has no movement or feeling from the chest down.

After studying history at Warwick University, he had a break year gaining work experience in several law firms in his native Manchester which confirmed his interest in law.

Having taken a law conversion course at Nottingham University he is now, aged 25, a trainee at Pannone & Partners in Manchester.'I had great support at both universities,' says Mr Fogerty, 'though Nottingham was physically a bit more difficult to get around.' He directed job applications at larger firms because he believed that they would have better facilities for the disabled and more money to adapt their offices.

Pannone & Partners has gone to some expense to equip their offices for Jonathan - their first wheelchair-bound solicitor - by installing a lift and specially adapted toilet facilities.

Mr Fogerty is pleased that the firm invested in him, but also feels that his presence encouraged the firm, which had a large personal injury department, to consider the needs of disabled clients.

'The firm realised it didn't have facilities for clients so it advanced its thinking,' says Mr Fogerty.At Pannones Mr Fogerty has done seats in private client work, criminal and commercial litigation, and is now doing personal injury work.

'Because of my own circumstances, I have an obvious empathy with people injured and disabled in accidents.

And without trivialising them, it helps them put their own injury into perspective if it is not as severe as mine.'An employed helper lives with Mr Fogerty and also assists when needed in the office.

'My assistant helps get me to work and to court, and also comes in to the office sometimes when I have say, a lot of filing, though usually there is someone at work to help with that.' This support is partly funded by the Department of Education and Employment's Access to Work programme which also provided some funds to Pannones for the office modifications.

'This programme promotes employment of disabled people by realising that employers can't be solely responsible for the expense of adapting offices, and helps the disabled person pay for assistance for those jobs they find particularly difficult,' explains Mr Fogerty.DISABILITY DISCRIMINATION LAW: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS BY YVONNE GALLAGHERA number of important issues have been clarified in relation to the operation of the Disability Discrimination Act during the course of 1998.

The legislation came into effect on December 1996 and accordingly, cases are now finding their way to the Employment Appeals Tribunal (EAT).

This process has clarified in some aspects the way in which the often complex provisions of the Act are to be interpreted.What is a disability?A number of cases have served to confirm that specific conditions fall within the scope of the Act.

These include myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) and post viral syndrome (O'Neill v Symm & Co Limited 1998 IRLR 233); bulimia nervosa and depression (Toogood v Clwyd Hospital, unreported); and abdominal pain, the cause of which was not known, where there was no doubt of its genuine nature (Howden v Capital Copiers Limited, unreported).

The EAT criticised a tribunal in Goodwin v Patent Office (The Times, 11 November 1998) for its failure to regard paranoid schizophrenia as a disability.The EAT has indicated that it will be useful to check whether an illness is listed in the World Health Organisation's international classification of diseases.The EAT has confirmed that a tribunal is entitled to find as a matter of fact that there is a disability, relying on the evidence of a GP, and not the specialist to whom an individual had been referred.

However, where expert evidence is to be given, this should be disclosed early.Exemptions for small employersThe Act originally provided that those employing fewer than 20 would be exempt from the provisions of the Act.

The Department of Education and Employment is empowered by the Act to lower the threshold following a review of its operation.

The Secretary of State has recently announced that with effect from 3 December 1998, the exemption limit will be reduced, so that only those employing fewer than 15 workers will be exempt from the provisions of the Act.Employer's knowledge of disabilityTribunals appear to be taking a practical and pragmatic approach to the question of when an employer should reasonably be expected to know that a disabled person has a disability which is likely to put him or her at a substantial disadvantage when compared with non-disabled peo ple.

In Ridout v TC Group [1998] IRLR 628, an applicant for employment had disclosed that she suffered from epilepsy.

However, she did not advise the employer that she would suffer a disadvantage from being interviewed in a room lit by fluorescent tubes.

The tribunal considered that the employer could not reasonably be expected to appreciate the potential disadvantage.

It considered that there was some onus on the individual to make the employer aware of the possible disadvantage.

The tribunal stated that the Act 'does not place on the employer the absolute onus to make every enquiry possible even where there is no, or very little basis for making such enquiry'.

Similarly, in the case of O'Neill v Symm, the EAT concluded that the employer could not reasonably have been expected to know that the individual's frequent absences over a short period of employment were due to a disability in the form of ME.Use of comparatorsThe concept of discrimination implicitly envisages that one individual is less favourably treated than another.

The question of the need for an appropriate comparator in proceedings under the Disability Discrimination Act was considered by the EAT in British Sugar plc v Kirker [1998] IRLR 624.

The Act refers to an employer treating a disabled person 'less favourably then he treats or would treat others to whom [the disability] does not apply'.

The EAT concluded that an applicant did not have to nominate an individual as a comparator by reference to whom he had been treated less favourably.

The DDA does not require a like for like comparison and therefore an individual does not have to find another person, either disabled or not disabled, by comparison with whom he has been treated less favourably.

This invites the use, in this context, of hypothetical comparisons, an approach which has fallen out of favour in relation to sex and race discrimination claims.Employer's duty to make reasonable adjustmentsIn Morse v Wiltshire County Council [1998] IRLR 352 the EAT reviewed the detailed operation of the provisions relating to the employer's obligations to make adjustments and the possibility of justifying a failure to make adjustments.

The employer should consider:-- Are there any physical features of its premises or arrangements made which place the disabled person at a disadvantage?-- If so, can take reasonable steps be taken in the circumstances which will prevent the premises or arrangements having that effect.The tribunal may only consider whether failure to make adjustment was justified if it first finds that the employer has failed to comply with its duties and that it has not taken reasonable steps.

Even if these steps do not achieve the aim of minimising the effect of the disability, the employer's justification for not taking steps will not be an issue.Awards of compensationIn July this year, the EAT upheld the award of £103,146.49 to the applicant in British Sugar plc v Kirker [1998] IRLR 624.

In that case, the applicant had been made redundant for reasons which included unlawful discrimination based on his disability.

There is no statutory cap on tribunal awards under the Act.

Accordingly, in arriving at its substantial award, the tribunal took account of lost earnings and injury to feelings, loss of future earnings (the individual was 40 years old) and loss of future pension rights.Management of casesIt is clear from the Goodwin v Patent Office case that the tribunals are to be encouraged to take a positive and inquisitorial role in dealing with claims under the Act.

There is no do ubt that the role of expert witnesses will expand.

Given the potential for significant awards for loss of earnings, it is reasonable to expect a move towards the use of expert witnesses in relation to employment prospects, as currently occurs in relation to personal injury claims.