ESG - Equity, Diversity & Inclusion - Boodle Hatfield

Your lawyers since 1722

Search all
Home Equity, Diversity & Inclusion

Equity, Diversity & Inclusion

We are fully committed to creating a working environment in which all people can excel. We are well known in the market for having an open, friendly and supportive culture that enables our people to thrive – being themselves at work.

We are proud of the diversity we have within the firm, particularly around gender and female leadership, but are nonetheless striving to improve across all areas of diversity.

The firm is led by Andrea Zavos, our second female Senior Partner. Andrea’s predecessor, Sara Maccallum, was appointed into the Senior Partner role at a time when fewer than 20% of females in the UK’s Top 20 Law Firms were promoted to partnership.

We continue to lead by example with positive female role models in the partnership, and an inclusive culture. Just under half of our Equity Partners are female and currently 42% of the full partnership are female.

We champion part-time and flexible working in addition to our hybrid working policy. A range of our people work part-time, including male and female Partners. Having a diverse workforce is seen as critical, as is enabling our people to thrive outside of work for themselves and their families.

We continue to review our policies – in 2024 we launched our first gender neutral parental leave policy. We want to ensure we support all staff in a fair and equitable way

Role modelling is crucial for a diverse work force. We are proud to have a range of role models, particularly at Partner and Director level. These include openly gay and lesbian Partners, carers, parents and step-parents and single parent Partners and Directors, as well as male role models who openly share their parenting and caring responsibilities.

Our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (ED&I) Committee leads several initiatives across the firm, with full support from the partnership. The Committee works across the firm to ensure inclusion and diversity is lived and breathed at all levels and across all departments.

Recruiting is core to developing our diversity and hiring the right people is vital – we do not recruit to fill quotas. We make great efforts to reach a more diverse range of candidates through a variety of means.

We support and encourage non-traditional routes into the legal profession, advertise our vacation scheme and training contracts through a wide range of university and non-university career websites reaching as many students as possible who are aspiring to be solicitors.

We look beyond grades and narrative answers, using the Ofsted website to look at the performance rating of the school the candidate attended so the application is not simply rejected in the first instance where we see lower grades or poorer narrative answers.

In April 2024, Construction Partner, Sarah Rock was awarded LGBTQIA Corporate Champion of the Year in the DIVA Awards. Read more

We regularly take part in local careers fairs organised in Southwark, speaking to secondary school students about legal and non-legal careers within law firms and demonstrating the various ways they could access the legal sector.

We have many examples that demonstrate clearly that career opportunities are not compromised by maternity, caring responsibility, ethnicity or sexual orientation. For example, we have promoted Senior Associates to Partners whilst they were on maternity leave.

We have an increasingly diverse workforce and we intend to continue to build on this success. To find out more, you can review the Boodle Hatfield Diversity Statistics 2023. The data is current at 31 July 2023 and is a 100% representation in relation to age. The other categories are based on responses received and the data has been rounded to the nearest one percent.

Some recent initiatives include:

  • LGBTQ+ education and awareness through lunch and learn sessions with inspirational speakers such as Polly Shute.
  • Celebrating Pride Month and Black History Month with a range of activities including an all firm coffee morning.
  • Women’s Health well-being sessions for all staff to help understand ways of providing support for women’s health at various stages in their lives.
  • Becoming founding members of the Better Bankside LGBTQ+ network.
  • Partners and staff attending the Southwark school careers fair each year talking about entry into the legal sector through solicitor and non-solicitor careers.
  • Celebrating key awareness days such as Mental Health Awareness Week.
  • Our Graduate Recruiter attending and presenting at law fairs at BPP to reach a diverse range of candidates.
  • Launching an ED&I survey to hear the views of our Partners and staff.
  • Being members of LeGal BeST and joining the new Better Bankside LGBTQ+ network.
  • Hosting a Freehold event headlined by Jake and Hannah Graf MBE talking about being transgender and starting a family through surrogacy.

Return to our ESG vision

At Boodle Hatfield we understand the value of community, the importance of the environment and the significance of working and living in a diverse world. Founded on good governance and being a responsible business, we are committed to making a difference by shaping legacies towards a better future.

Click here