How can we support diverse talent?

Driving Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion is an important part of our culture at RWK Goodman, and as part of our continued commitment to this, we have signed up to a number of programmes and initiatives in line with our EDI Action Plan.

Our Action Plan is built up of a series of objectives which focus on embedding inclusion and diversity into areas such as early careers, recruitment, our clients and communities and management and leadership. To bring our vision to life, recent areas of focus have been aimed at increasing ethnic representation and embedding EDI into values and leadership.

To help us deliver on these objectives, we have committed to an external reciprocal mentoring scheme. A number of our Partners have signed up to the scheme and have been paired with a black mentee, to develop a greater understanding of their lived experiences, while providing unique insights from their own professional career. We are proud to partner with Black Lawyers Matter to facilitate this programme, whose aim is to offer a solution to organisations and individuals that are looking to improve the representation of people from minority backgrounds in the legal sector. They are focussed on providing authentic mentoring experiences to aspiring black legal professionals. By engaging in this mentoring programme, we hope to increase our ethnic representation, as well as educate and engage our managers and leaders across the Firm.

In addition to this, we are also excited to announce that we have signed up to the 10,000 Black Interns Programme. This innovative programme seeks to offer 2,000 internships every year for 5 consecutive years across a range of industries, in order to improve workplace representation in the UK. This is a programme we are really excited about and we’ll be starting by welcoming 3 interns into our London office this summer. As well as providing training and development opportunities for the interns, they will also have the opportunity to learn about what it’s like to work in a law firm, gain insight into RWK Goodman as a business, interact with our Trainees on our Training Contract process, and learn more about our EDI commitment. We are proud to be a part of the 10,000 Black Interns journey to help provide opportunities to those individuals who might otherwise face barriers to entry.

We’re delighted to work with both of these programmes as they really focus on the importance of embedding a diverse culture into businesses and creating equal opportunities for all, which aligns strongly with our vision and values. We hope that by participating in these initiatives, we can help contribute to real change in this space, as well as strengthening our own talent pipelines and increasing our ethnic diversity too. As a firm, we remain committed to continually exploring ways in which we can further engage our colleagues, clients, and communities to further reinforce our culture and strive towards achieving our ED&I objectives.