From closing pay gaps to tackling the climate crisis, we’re starting conversations and taking action.

Here at Anthony Collins Solicitors (ACS), we believe building a better business starts with better awareness of issues in today’s world, more transparency around pay gaps and concrete plans to improve.

Many businesses say they promote equality, diversity and inclusion (ED&I), but in our case, these values are central to the way we do business. Fulfilling our commitment to work with a social purpose depends on having a community that fully embrace every aspect of ED&I.

Celebrating diversity

Even when we couldn’t be together due to Covid-19, we continued to celebrate the diversity of our teams in different ways, from marking religious occasions to supporting Pride Month and International Women’s Day together. The pandemic also meant it has been more important than ever to find ways to adapt to our employees’ needs and protect their mental wellbeing.

Our recent success in winning Law Firm of the Year (Independents) at The Lawyer Awards 2021 is partly due to our truly diverse and inclusive culture. In our latest internal engagement survey, we were delighted to see diversity scored as the highest of all 60 categories, with 94% agreeing that they feel they are treated fairly, regardless of position or any protected characteristics.

Advocates for equality

We have delivered on last year’s commitment to sign the Women in Law pledge. Now we’re making good progress with our ongoing targets to improve gender diversity across the firm, particularly at senior and leadership levels.

At the time of writing, 74% of our fee earners are women. We have also appointed two women onto our non-lawyer senior management team where no female representation previously existed.

Our climate pledge

Being a better business isn’t just about our people. It’s also about looking after our planet for everyone’s benefit. We’re committed to doing everything we can to make sure our clients, our firm and our people are thinking and behaving as sustainably as possible.

To show our commitment to change, we’re taking action by creating our own climate pledge. Our journey to net-zero has officially begun.

“It’s not enough that we advise our clients on delivering their own green agenda and sustainability pledges. As a business ourselves, we need to lead by example and that’s why we’ve made the pledge to be a net carbon zero business by 2030, which is a full 20 years ahead of the mandated 2050 deadline for the UK.”
Peter Hubbard, senior partner, Anthony Collins Solicitors

Our commitments for 2022-2023

1. Sign the Race Fairness Commitment – we will join other law firms making a commitment to racial equality by ensuring fairness at work for people of all ethnic backgrounds.

2. Review our internal and external recruitment processes – we will make our processes fair to all (e.g. using blind CVs) and advertise our posts widely. This will include specifically working with agencies that attract people from ethnic minorities and diverse backgrounds. We will also make sure this continues to apply to our trainee programme intake.

3. Increase targeted mentoring and coaching – we will support women and employees from ethnic minorities with strong career trajectories. We will help them grow into leadership positions by identifying talent pipelines and providing strong role models.

4. Women in Law pledge – now we are accredited, we will fulfil our action plan. This will involve reviewing our promotions policy to support our under-represented employee groups, as well as our flexible working offer. We will also deliver our ambitious line management development programme.