Slaughter and May announced today that it would promote ten new partners in May. This from a firm that normally makes up only two or three.
It is the largest round of promotions since 2000 and all ten are in London. It puts Freshfields' most recent promotions in the shade. Although unlike Freshfields, only one of the ten is a woman.
Senior Partner Chris Saul told me that when he qualified in 1986 he was one of ten, but accepted that this was an unusally high number of partners to promote. That said, there was an unusually high number of fantastic candidates. He said that the shameful paucity of women in the round was entirely accidental: last year the split was 50/50, over the last five years (including this) 30% of new partners have been women and as of 10th May four of the firm's practice heads will be women.
All ten will see their pay jump to over a million a year overnight. Whatever happens in today's budget is unlikely to cause them much concern.
Read more on Friday.
It is the largest round of promotions since 2000 and all ten are in London. It puts Freshfields' most recent promotions in the shade. Although unlike Freshfields, only one of the ten is a woman.
Senior Partner Chris Saul told me that when he qualified in 1986 he was one of ten, but accepted that this was an unusally high number of partners to promote. That said, there was an unusually high number of fantastic candidates. He said that the shameful paucity of women in the round was entirely accidental: last year the split was 50/50, over the last five years (including this) 30% of new partners have been women and as of 10th May four of the firm's practice heads will be women.
All ten will see their pay jump to over a million a year overnight. Whatever happens in today's budget is unlikely to cause them much concern.
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Read more on Friday.
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I suspect in many ways the slaughters method (i.e. tap on the shoulder with no real process) is less biased against women than the very formal processes the other big firms in the UK now all seem to run which are basically extended, vaguely confrontational interviews.
Unless the way law firms do business radically changes (i.e. the hours get much shorter), or society radically changes (so that men taking the lead on looking after children becomes normal) then we'll probably always have some sort of imbalance.
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