LPM’s people guru, Polly Jeanneret, discusses getting suited and booted, going ‘PC-mad’ and hiring Oxbridge-educated only staff
Q What’s all this furore over lawyers avoiding wearing brown shoes with blue suits?
A There is no furore: there is a social media furore and that is not the same thing. For those of you who may have missed the non-furore, it all started with a report on social media from a conference where a City partner (unnamed) is said to have advised young, presumably male, lawyers to steer clear of this colourful brown/blue combination. But has this City partner not read about Baker McKenzie’s business-casual-every-day rule introduced last year? Isn’t this brown/blue thing pure snobbery? Keep your dress codes simple not sartorial, I say. You can still keep in a caveat that staff “should all dress appropriately to reflect our working commitments on any given day,” as Baker McKenzie put it.
Q We have a partner who takes the line that the world has gone ‘PC-mad’ and he’s not allowed to express his opinions anymore. He’s even hinted he is being discriminated against. Does he have a case?
A I’ve met this guy, haven’t I? Or maybe there’s more than one of them out there … either way, he doesn’t have a case. Political correctness is not a belief, and being antipolitically correct is even less likely to be a belief, however strongly he holds these views. But I’m wondering whether this is someone who feels a tad disenfranchised by modernity, and that behind all the rants there are some more simple concerns that could be resolved.
Keep your dress codes simple not sartorial, I say. You can still keep in a caveat that staff “should all dress appropriately to reflect our working commitments on any given day …”
Q Not that I think it is a great recruitment strategy but would we be allowed to recruit for ‘Oxbridge-educated’ candidates only, like a firm in the US did recently?
A Probably legal but definitely passé: even magic circlers don’t admit to recruiting in this way. This concerns a UK legal recruitment agency that published a job at an unnamed US law firm with an Oxbridge-only criteria for the position. But Clifford Chance went CV-blind way back in 2014 (in the final round of interviews the panel do not know what university or school the candidate has been to). Even the likes of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and Linklaters use contextual recruitment (joining an estimated 70 firms and now even some barrister chambers). It has been pointed out, however, that perhaps what the firm was after was not so much a candidate with a spiffing education but one with fabulous connections. Perhaps not so passé after all?
This article can be found in LPM May magazine: The right protection?
