Renewing Resilience and growth in the Scottish legal sector

With Diversity+ celebrating its fourth birthday this month, we bring you a reflective piece from our founder, Naeema. She shares her insights on how to nurture personal growth and resilience in the Scottish legal sector, while challenging intergenerational bias and demands for a healthier future-focused legal professional.

I formally set up Diversity+ on 11th May 2021. Statistically, the odds of the business being a success were stacked against me.

A recent report highlights:

• 7.7% of new businesses in the UK do not make it past the first year (2025).

• The one-year survival rate is 92.3% (2025).

• 71.1% of new businesses will fail within the first 3 years.

• Only 39.4% of small businesses reach the 5-year mark

But I knew I had to get out and find a new, healthier purpose. I was most probably heading towards burnout. Back then, I was either unaware of it or chose to overlook it, instead depending on my resilience and strong work ethic to carry me through. But what if I had never had the chance to develop these skills?

Going into our fourth year, resilience has, and will continue to be, key if Diversity+ is to survive and thrive. Not only because of the current backlash on EDI, but also our fast-changing workplaces and those who choose to enter them. And I’m not the only business leader thinking this.

In the last few months, talking to other business leaders - predominantly those in the Scottish legal sector - the power of resilience and how we help shape it for the future generation of lawyers keeps coming up. It’s something I think a lot about in an effort to close what I see as an intergenerational gap and cause for concern.

Is resilience a lost cause?

Resilience and strong work ethics are fast becoming concepts we are being encouraged not to talk about, amidst the fear that such conversations may lead to antagonising a younger generation who are experiencing burnout and poor mental health at earlier career stages.

I think differently. I believe the leaders of yesterday and today have a responsibility to have these conversations and a duty to pass on these skills to the next generation. Not only for the survival of the profession, but for the better health of everyone in the workplace. If we wish our profession to not only survive but thrive in the future, we need to have these difficult conversations, and we need to have them now.

More so than ever before, we need to create initiatives that introduce and nurture essential business skills, one of which is resilience, into our succession planning. I suspect many heads of departments and partners in law firms are looking behind them to see who will step into their shoes as they approach retirement, and are looking for an economical and gracious way out.

Many in their 50s and 60s are anxious that their retirement plans are fading further and further into the distance because there are no plans in place for someone to take over.

Others in senior positions, having worked with their foot on the accelerator for many years with the aim that they will build up teams to delegate to, are finding this impossible to do. Many fear asking their team members to stay past 5pm or work over the weekend, resulting in their workload and fee-earning needs increasing, rather than reducing.

Some, having planned to reduce to a 3 or 4 day week in an effort to lead from the top and be seen to achieve a better work/life balance, are considering leaving altogether.

If this is the state of the Scottish legal sector today, there are big questions that need to be asked.

• How do we plan for our retirement, confident that we have the talent in place to take over?

• How do we pass on resilience and strong work ethics to ensure future talent is leadership-ready?

• How do we have these conversations without alienating those we wish to nurture?

• How do we find solutions without being accused of being anti-work/life balance?

• How do we protect our own mental health whilst also supporting the well-being of those to follow?

It’s a controversial and polarising subject that needs to be talked about and addressed. Silence and fear are no longer options. We may be past the pandemic with all restrictions lifted, but the new normal in the way we work is here to stay, and there is no going back.

How do we teach resilience?

I think back to my childhood and the concepts of strong work ethics and resilience being ingrained into me at a young age. There was an element of survival, but also the hunger to improve and grow.

Yes, I was encouraged to work hard - harder than others for the reason that I would have to, to get into places that were not designed for me. But over time, I also learned that the rewards were so much greater. I don’t mean the money or status. I’m referring to the pride and satisfaction I felt when reaching MY goals. Goals I earned with sheer hard grind, and let’s be honest, working long hours. This reality also needs to be talked about, both in terms of the positives and the negatives.

The unrivalled satisfaction you get as a result of your efforts, and yours alone, needs to be shared and encouraged. That you are not a tick box exercise or a ‘diversity hire’. That you were the best candidate for the role. The fact that you are proud of your achievements should be shared without guilt.

Equally, we should not shy away from talking about the guilt, and often resentment, we felt when we missed personal commitments or family events, as work demands weighed heavily on our shoulders. This, too, helped us to build resilence.

These are the stories we need to share and the personal values we need to pass on.

As leaders of yesterday and today, we need to rethink the rhetoric of ‘the young lack work ethics and resilience’ and replace it with ‘what are we doing to help them build such skills?’

If, like me, you are Generation X, strong work ethics and resilience will most likely have been entrenched in you as a child. We saw and learned from our parents. We were the lucky ones. But are we necessarily passing these skills on to our children?

If you also, like me, started your legal career in the 90s, you had the opportunity of enhancing these skills further in the workplace, learning directly from within the office, in person, from those around you and often ahead of you. In an age of flexible work and working from home, these opportunities have hugely decreased. Not only are we having to make up for lost time during the pandemic, but we are also having to adjust to agile working patterns that will most likely remain in place, in one form or another. Flexible working comes with many advantages, but it is also riddled with complexities and unknowns that we have not yet mastered.

We are still battling the ‘new normal’, not fully understanding our emerging talents' needs and skill gaps. Who needs more office support? Who needs mentoring? Who needs more exposure to client contact? Who needs the opportunity to learn networking skills? Who needs support with developing interpersonal skills? And the big one, who needs to be in the office more?

On the other side, we have line managers, senior fee earners and partners feeling overworked and overstretched, equally wanting a better work/life balance but unable to delegate to their juniors for fear of challenge and antagonism. How do we reach a compromise? How do we bridge this gap?

Over 42% of respondents to the Law Society of Scotland’s Profile of the Profession survey stated they have considered leaving the profession in the last 5 years (for reasons other than retirement). Of those, 56% are between 6 to 15 years qualified.

Do we sacrifice their fee-earning capacity in substitution for them providing life and career-building lessons to younger employees on strong work ethics and resilience? How can we better retain those in senior roles?

Passing the torch

Whilst the waters become muddy, clear solutions can be found.

Perhaps we need to carve out a senior support role to meet both problems head-on. Experienced solicitors, who could be considering leaving and taking with them sought-after skills, could be placed as salaried in-house mentors to support the emerging talent and leaders of tomorrow. The money spent on recruiting the loss of talent could be redirected to retain talent. Could this be the solution to fill the intergenerational gap and support our multigenerational firms at all levels?

One thing is for sure: the future of the profession and those we seek to serve both need and value such life and business skills. Investing in them is investing in the future.

Resilience and strong work ethics are core skills we instil into our Diversity+ Law Academy students. We’ve achieved great results. We go to great lengths to get to know our students, understand their individual needs, identify skill gaps and help them reduce or remove them with bespoke support and learning opportunities.

It's been a steep learning curve for me, too. It was this year’s flagship pro-bono project, and its success has been beyond what I had imagined. It’s been equally rewarding and enlightening. So many of the ideas we have applied to this project can be applied to the wider profession. Perhaps in the months and years to come, we will do just that.

Want to learn more about the intergenerational gap and our tips on how to close it? Read our article for the Law Society of Scotland here.

We are looking for sponsors for our Diversity+ Law Academy, and would appreciate your support in levelling the playing field for aspiring solicitors from less advantaged backgrounds. Learn more about the Diversity+ law academy here.