Women Lawyers Division Bristol Survey

The recent First 100 years Survey highlighted inequalities between men and women in the legal profession due to the COVID-19.

The WLD Bristol want to find out more about the impact COVID-19 has had on our members and the women in the profession locally.

More importantly we want to find out more about what we can do to help!

Share your thoughts by completing our quick survey. It only takes a couple of minutes to complete.

WLD Bristol Mentoring Network Launch

The Women Lawyers Division (Bristol) is pleased to announce the launch of their new mentoring network.

While we are seeing some easing of lockdown restrictions, it is inevitable that working life will be mainly from home for the next few months and we will all need to continue to adjust as part of our working lives. With that in mind we want to make sure that we provide peer support and mentoring relationship locally by setting up a Women Lawyers Division Mentoring Network, so that members can feel supported as they start to move forward towards whatever comes next.

Launch Event

We will be holding a launch event online on 9 July from 1.00 – 1.45 pm, where we will hear from guest speaker, Emma Jones, from the University of Sheffield. Emma will speak about the benefits of formal mentoring, the positive impact that it can have on your mental health and wellbeing and the ways in which it can be used to provide support. We will also hear from Coralie McKeivor, Chair of Women Lawyers Division in Bristol who will tell us more about the new mentoring network and how you can get involved.

Guest Speaker

Dr Emma Jones is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Sheffield. Prior to this, she was Teaching Director at The Open University Law School. She originally practised as a solicitor, specialising in construction law. Her research focuses on the role of emotions and wellbeing in legal education and the legal profession and she leads the Fit for Law project with the charity LawCare.

Mentoring Network

We are looking for both mentors and mentees that would be interested in taking part in the scheme. For the first stage of this Mentoring Scheme, we ask that you commit to a minimum of three video calls of 30 minutes over the next 6-8 weeks. If this sounds like something that would be of interest or you are interested in mentoring generally, please join us for this event.

Sign up to our launch event using Eventbrite. Joining details will be sent prior to the event.

Driving Pay Equality in the Legal Sector

Aoife Whitford, Diversity and Inclusion Champion at the Pay Index, invites firms to take a short survey to gauge the sector’s willingness to participate in a detailed survey of the legal sector’s gender, BAME, LGBTQ+, and disabled employee pay equality.

Read the full article here.

The Pay Index is keen to deliver a detailed survey of the legal sector’s gender, BAME, LGBTQ+, and disabled employee pay equality. Any company that participates would be free to use its data and information gathered to improve its own internal metrics and the findings will be made available to all members this summer. Therefore we encourage you and your organisation to be a part of this.

As a first step, PayIndex would like to gauge how useful this survey and subsequent findings would be to both the legal profession and individual solicitors by asking you to take this quick initial survey.

Take the survey

Webinar: An introduction to Professional Coaching: What is it and why should I care?

Bristol Law Society in association with Luke Menzies Coaching invites WLD members to an online webinar on 1 July 2020 at 1 pm.

Coaching has developed enormously over recent years. Nowadays, hundreds of thousands of business people and professionals – including many lawyers – are benefitting from coaching every year in the UK alone. So what’s it’s all about? How can it help a solicitors’ firm or chambers? Luke Menzies, a Bristol lawyer and professional coach, will provide an insight into the world of coaching for professionals and business people.

As part of this session, Luke will shed light on the positively focussed ‘thinking space’ that coaching provides for a busy professional, tackling practical and essential topics such as where you want to go in your career (and wider life), how you might get there and what unhelpful habits you may be able to spot and then shed along the way, to increase your performance, resilience, success and overall happiness. It includes how your ‘best self’ can get the opportunity to turn up for work every day – not just occasionally or when you’re lucky.

This is sure to be a thought-provoking webinar from someone who is not afraid to challenge the way we lawyers tend to view our working life.

Click here for full information and to book your place.