This morning, Amanda Farmer got to contact about her recently launched business featuring an all-women team of lawyers. Despite her new website receiving an “overwhelmingly positive” response, she’s also been asked the question, “where’s the diversity”?
Curious to see what the fuss was all about, I entered her site and was immediately excited. Farmer is featured at the top of the page with four female employees as the collective face of the boutique practice, Lawyers Chambers on Riley.
It is one of the most refreshing websites for a law firm I have ever seen – and having been a legal reporter and editor, I’ve seen plenty in my time.
I love the all-female brand and that they’re openly owning everything about it. Anyone who’s ever had to pose for a professional photo will know that it’s not easy. Getting this photo must have taken a lot of time but ultimately does wonders for supporting the firm’s brand and message of ‘Upfront, no nonsense legal advice & representation”. It’s proudly feminine, and rightly so, aimed at supporting Farmer’s belief that ‘women lawyers’ should embrace the fact they’re ‘women lawyers’ by challenging outdated ideas regarding how legal services are provided and harnessing so-called ‘female’ traits like empathy, resilience, energy and dedication.
The main picture features a young, female team but it’s not difficult to see the diversity. As Farmer points out, it seems the person asking the diversity question appears uncomfortable by the presence of an all-male legal team, possibly because all-male legal teams (at least in leadership) have for too long traditionally been the norm.
Recently, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency found almost 70% of the legal profession’s employees are female but hold just 6.5% of ‘CEO/Head of business’ profession in the sector. The dearth of visible female leaders means we’ve become accustomed with the idea that men run the legal sector, and that it’s perfectly acceptable to see mostly male faces in the marketing materials of legal businesses.
Farmer is using her brand to challenge our traditional assumptions about a legal team and believes more women should move from fitting an “established (male) mould”. A team can be all-female, and that can be a powerful thing. Diversity, meanwhile, can be embraced in other ways.
She’s also part of an expanding cohort of women who are rejecting big business in order to do their own thing. Sick of missed opportunities, inflexibility and a lack of visible women at the top, they’re simply creating their own businesses and defying the status quo.
This week, Russell Crowe has cause a stir of his own by declaring that women in Hollywood should “act their age”.
He’s wrong. Women should act however they want to act. As Farmer shows, that may mean reinventing just how we brand and market ourselves, writing our own scripts and determining just which characters we want to play.
