Access Law Leadership Challenge

Main idea

Outline

The Access Law Leadership Challenge is a collaboration between the UCD community (UCD Access and Lifelong Learning, UCD Sutherland School of Law, UCD Careers and UCD Alumni Relations) and the legal firm Mason Hayes & Curran. The aim of the Challenge is to invite students from underrepresented groups to demonstrate outstanding leadership by championing diversity solutions in the legal profession. The winning submissions are awarded paid summer placement opportunities, mentoring, and bursaries for reading materials.

Goals

• The aim of the project is to increase diversity within the legal profession.
• To create opportunities for access students to progress into the legal profession.

Target group

Obstacles targetted:

• Economic obstacles
• Social obstacles

Students involvement

Law students provide submissions on how to make the legal profession more inclusive. These are assessed by a judging panel and awards are provided to students accordingly. 

Past participants have been involved in the design and planning of the following year’s challenge including setting the Challenge question and providing their perspective and insights at the information session launching the Challenge. (They are remunerated for their input).

Inspiration and evidence

Background:

The importance of Diversity has been well demonstrated (LSRA, Law Society, and The Bar of Ireland). Irish law firms have made commendable efforts to increase diversity in the legal profession, to name a few, UCD Sutherland Opportunity supported by Mason, Hayes and Curran and Matheson D & I Scholarship. 

However, findings from law students and graduates suggest that significant barriers to entry persist. 

Through focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with Access students on UCD law programmes, we generated interesting insights into the barriers to the legal profession and the challenges that graduates from underrepresented groups face in their early career progression into the legal profession. UCD Access students are students from diverse backgrounds, including. 

• socio-economic groups that have low participation in higher education
• first-time mature students
• students with disabilities
• part-time/flexible learners
• lone parents
• further education and training-award holders.

Below are some of the focus group findings:

• There is a belief that Who You Know/ not What You Know is an advantage to progressing into the legal profession.
• Minority Tax – a burden to be diverse.
• Backing A Lost Cause – harder for those who are from rural areas and have less connections. 
• A Disembodied Profession – Firms need to do more outreach so that the profession feels more attainable. 
• They Love the story not Diversity – law firms do not know how to talk or train people from diverse backgrounds. 
• Fallacy of Meritocracy – hard work and high grades do not necessarily equate to progression in the legal profession. 
• Matching the Room – there is no room for diversity in the profession – you have to match the room.

Inspiration:

That there would be a sense of continuity of access meaning that the idea of access and widening participation went beyond just university setting but continued as the student progressed from their studies into their careers. 

The evidence suggested that there was a problem in terms of low numbers of access students progressing into the legal profession. 

In addition to the focus group, below are other materials that informed the project:

• LSRA (2019) The Pathways to the Professions: The LSRA First Annual Report on the Admission to the Legal Profession.
• UCD Careers Graduate Outcome Survey (GOS)
• University for ALL toolkit
• Who Counts? University for All Data, Metrics, and Evidence 2020-21
• Open Doors Initiative Inclusivity Employment toolkit 
• Law Society of Ireland Annual Reports (2020-2021)

Success criteria

• Actively promotes equal opportunities & diversity & inclusion. 
• Having more access students gain internship/traineeship opportunities by engaging in more career events and networking opportunities so they can feel more connected to the profession and deepen relationships with those working in the industry. 
• Supported by professional bodies. 

Effectiveness

 See information in Pathways to the ProfessionsP2P project entry.

Do you feel you can effectively provide the support that students require?

Evaluation

Yes – stakeholder questionnaires

Communication

• Social Media
• Direct emails to students 
• Flyer 
• Webpage 
• Communication to relevant faculty and industry.

Timing

Trimester 2

Resources

• Dedicated budget 
• Project Co-ordinator to drive project and foster stakeholder engagement. 
• Promotional material – flyers, posters, social media 
• Resources for e.g. dedicated space to run events
• Administrative costs

Extra information

• Access Law Leadership Challenge

Transferability

We think it is easily transferable to other contexts or groups.

This initiative is informed by universal design and entries to the challenge must be universally designed and their is a choice of format: blog post, infographic or video.