Reshaping Legal Services: How do we dismantle barriers to a diverse and inclusive profession?

The Legal Services Board podcast

In March 2021, the Legal Services Board published its 10-year sector-wide strategy to reshape legal services to better meet society’s needs. Since publishing the strategy, the LSB has been developing plans to curate the strategy, in other words, engage the sector to collaborate and deliver on the Strategy. As part of this, the LSB has developed a Reshaping Legal Services microsite which will be a platform for stakeholders to showcase their work and how it aligns with the strategy.

Alongside this, we have also developed the RLS podcast series to document progress against the strategy’s challenges across the sector and identify ways for stakeholders to collaborate and deliver to reshape legal services to better meet society’s needs through fairer outcomes, stronger confidence and better services.

The first episode of the Reshaping Legal Services podcast looks at how we can dismantle barriers to a diverse and inclusive profession, which falls under the ‘fairer outcomes’ theme of the strategy. In this episode, we interview Debbie Foster, Professor of Employment Relations and Diversity at Cardiff Business School and Chair of Lawyers with Disabilities, Law Society, Jane Burton, who tell us a bit more about their joint research project called ‘Legally Disabled, which produces valuable research on the career experiences of disabled people in the legal profession. Then in the latter part of this episode, we speak with Elizabeth Rimmer, Chief Executive of LawCare, who tells us about LawCare’s work to improve mental health in the legal services sector and where she sees the future of legal services.

You can find out more about Legally Disabled here: http://legallydisabled.com/

You can follow LawCare on Twitter: @LawCareLtd.