New director lays out plans for training shake-up in bid to end inequalities

EQUALITY AND DIVERSITY: Law Society to encourage action not words, to beat discrimination

Solicitors need to move from rhetoric to reality in encouraging equality of opportunity -- especially in relation to applications for training places -- the Law Society's new equality and diversity director said last weekend in her first public address.

Manjot Dhanjal, who previously worked in local government and was a lay administrator at the Office for Supervision of Solicitors, told the Trainee Solicitors Group annual conference in Bristol that discrimination within the profession reflected the views of the wider community.

But she said there has been a recent 'sea change in the national psyche', and a dawning realisation that 'differences strengthen us'.

Ms Dhanjal said the Lawrence inquiry had been a watershed, leaving few institutions untouched: 'It is also perhaps the first time there has been recognition of structural discrimination.'

She said she would be focusing on the training contract because 'it has become a rigid filter...

where structural inequalities come into focus'.

These involved not simply academic achievements of applicants, but also whether they had been to a traditional or modern university, whether they had family links to firms, and whether they had had the opportunity to carry out vacation work.

Ms Dhanjal also pointed to financial exclusion, by which prospective lawyers from poorer backgrounds are discouraged from embarking on expensive legal practice courses.She said her framework for action included a review of training establishments, monitoring applications for places, and career progression.

She will also oversee the introduction of a diversity-access scheme, which will include a scholarship fund to assist students from deprived or ethnic minority backgrounds to obtain access to training.

She said the task required courage: '[Research shows] one in ten women felt they had been sexually harassed.

But many of these incidents went unreported because trainees were fearful of the impact on them.'

Jeremy Fleming