The ‘Reshaping Legal Services’ conference was a rewarding event to attend: it was a critical examination of measures taken to make the legal profession more inclusive, comprising a celebration of successes, while acknowledging and rigorously analysing the areas in which work still remains. This blog discusses my key takeaways of this event.
Empathy’s importance
The presentation by Lola Bello, Legal Services Consumer Panel Manager, on ethnic minorities’ experiences of using legal services, made points that are so penetrating that they’re impossible to ignore. She spoke of a survey conducted of ethnic minority users of legal services, particularly professional legal advice. She mentioned that human factors (e.g., the advisor’s ability to connect with the client on a personal level) played an important part in consumers’ decisions on what interaction to have with legal services. These factors’ importance was emphasized by the disparity in trust levels felt towards legal professionals by white consumers vs. BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) consumers. Overall, ethnic minorities seemed to have a less positive experience with legal professionals than their white counterparts, and were likely to trust said professionals less. Responsiveness by the legal advisors, the amount of effort put in by legal professionals to ensure that those that they were working for were always on the same page, and their ability to emotionally connect with their clients were some important factors, according to the survey. An anecdotal example of a legal team’s attention to cultural sensitivity was given. A BAME client needed help with a legal matter, and the legal advisors ensured, by repeatedly checking in with her, that the language they were using was not in conflict to her cultural sensitivities. This is something that should be remembered, and paid attention to, as an example of best practice. What impressed me was the articulation of this level of sensitivity to human factors such as sensitivities relating to cultural/religious/racial background or other protected characteristic, such as disability, as a baseline standard that legal professionals should work towards, since many of those I consider to be my personal mentors and role models in this jurisdiction’s legal profession have already surpassed this standard.
Technology usage and everyday exclusion
Sir Geoffrey Vos, Master of the Roles, emphasized the importance of digitization of the court system. Humorous and witty, his speech nevertheless made some important points. These included the fact that increased digitization would lead to increased accessibility of the legal system, and that this would also help increase efficiency as well. He emphasized on always involving IT professionals in the design of such systems. As a blind person who has to live with the daily reality of digital inaccessibility, I wished to ask him a question: to what extent should digital accessibility to the disabled, in his opinion, be a consideration in digitization of the legal system, and how do we better ensure it gets the importance it deserves? My opinion is that it should be central to considerations of access to justice.
The thing that struck me most about Sir Geoffrey Voss’s speech was his drawing to our attention an example of everyday exclusion: the types of conversations that judges—mainly from very elite backgrounds—had outside of the courtroom, which might exclude those in whose lives topics such as ‘Cricket, Oxford and the opera’ were not of interest. While it may be argued that some of what he said constitutes rather broad generalizations, I think that the overall point is a good one, and needs to be considered carefully. He attempted to explain, in granular detail, how exclusion works. To understand how inclusion should work, it is important, in my opinion, to understand the mechanics of the polar opposite concept, and this is what he was attempting to do. Rather than devoting time to hackneyed phrases such as ‘nothing about us without us’ or ‘social model of disability’, more concretised, down-to-earth discussions about the lived realities of discrimination need to take place. I hope to hear many more speeches like Sir Geoffrey’s in the coming years. Such discussions should, hopefully, help to make the profession a more equitable and accessible one, not one that assumes ‘talent’ comes in only one shape, form or size.
More stories
