Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at LawDeb

“Our ability to deliver peace of mind for our clients comes down to our people. Our approach to attract, retain and develop a diverse cross section of gender, ethnicity, age and background, whilst ensuring the high quality for which we are known, means we are reaping the rewards of genuine diversity of thought. We are encouraged by our progress and are committed to ongoing support of diversity, equity and inclusion across our seven businesses and eight global locations.”
Denis Jackson - LawDeb CEO

Our progress so far

Whilst there is always more to do we know our people and our clients value transparency around our journey. In February 2024 we were named the best performer in the FTSE 250 for women in leadership but the FTSE Women Leaders Review. You can see more details here.

Here we provide insight into where we are and our next steps.

Who inspires those at LawDeb?

For International Women's Day 2024 we asked our people who inspires them in this short video. Many colleagues from our offices around the world took part in the video below. We were pleased that so many mentioned their own LawDeb colleagues as women that inspire them, both personally and professionally. Of course, family also came up a lot with some of the examples sure to inspire us all. More widely there were peers that we work with (great to hear Mark Filer mention Tamara Box who we are lucky to work with regularly), sports stars, pop stars and more. Watch the video below.

Some of our initiatives

Expand each box below to see more detail of our progress.

Building a better culture

LawDeb has long been a business focused on delivering peace of mind to our clients. We wanted to make sure that we offered the same to our people through an open and positive culture.

In 2021, a working group from LawDeb came together to brainstorm what drove our behaviours at LawDeb, and what we wanted to take forward to shape, guide and frame our future decisions. We decided on four powerful values, each with a set of actionable behaviours to demonstrate how we envisage this value is lived day to day at LawDeb.

These values now feed into all that we do at LawDeb and ensure our people are comfortable with the type of organisation we are.

We enjoy an annual Culture Week which reinforces these themes are allows us to both reflect on the year gone and plan for the year ahead - to ensure we are all truly living our values for the benefit of ourselves, our team and our clients.

Developing our HR processes, policies and training

As we grow our business ensuring consistency across each team around career progression, benefits and opportunities is essential. We have therefore redesigned and introduced a number of HR policies to ensure all employees are following the same guidelines and know where they stand. An example of this is our Health & Compassionate Leave Policy which includes time with dependents.

In addition to the creation of these policies we are focused on formally training our people managers to ensure they are all well-versed in the policies and what they mean for their team members. This will drive equity across the business with all staff, regardless of team, receiving the same information and treatment.

We have also introduced Unconscious Bias training at all levels across the business. We believe that understanding this area and knowing the steps to take to avoid bias will be a positive for our ongoing recruitment as well as ensuring inclusivity for our existing people.

Clear career progression framework

There are a number of businesses within LawDeb each of which offers a different area of focus and therefore a different progression journey. We are actively working on formal frameworks for each that give our people confidence in timelines and requirements to progress to the next stage of their career. This is called our LawDeb Landmarks Programme and has been successfully rolled out to our Corporate Secretarial Services Team with other team plans currently being developed.

We have also introduced out gender-balanced Discovering Leaders Programme to inspire the next generation of leaders within the business. Each cohort benefits from training from our existing leaders to ensure they have a broad skill set to support their progression, for example around people management, stakeholder management and business development efforts.

Gender pay gap reporting

For those we have worked with for a number of years the changes in culture already mentioned are likely evident. We have retained our focus on providing peace of mind to our clients whilst understanding that this now incorporates more than purely the service we deliver. We are focused on understanding what our people and our clients expect and have articulated this through our four values: Make Change Happen; Better Together; Believe It’s Possible and Never Stop Learning. Encompassing all of these values is our work around diversity and here we publish our Gender Pay Gap Report Summary.

View the summary here

Hear from our Senior Leaders

When it comes to diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) LawDeb COO Trish Houston is passionate about making change happen.

In the first of a series of videos where our senior leaders chat to those earlier in their career Trish speaks to Chelsea Chivers from the Corporate Secretarial Services business about how attitudes towards DE&I have evolved during her career.

The LawDeb value of ‘Better Together' is about bringing different people with different experiences and different perspectives together and truly valuing what they bring to our business.
Trish Houston - LawDeb COO