“I’m from a working-class, single parent home. Only in recent times can you own who you are in law”

My mum went through quite an unpleasant divorce when I was a child. I remember sitting in the divorce lawyer's office and it being like another world. The lawyer was an incredible woman who offered my mum support at a very challenging point in her life.

I remember thinking, “I could do this”. That was the trigger for me. I saw law as a profession that supported people – that provided advice and was there as a backbone for people when they were in the most difficult of times.

I come from a working-class background and a single parent household. Access to the sector was challenging. I got a foot in the door because my mum cleaned the house of someone who was a law firm partner in London.

I was a slightly precocious, probably very irritating teenager. It was luck that my mum had a conversation with him, that he was prepared to listen and see that he was in a position of privilege to be able to offer me access to the sector through work experience. The experience was daunting and exciting, and made me even more certain a career in law was what I wanted. It did, however, require a sacrifice by my mum, who needed to fund a new suit to ensure I could take up the opportunity.

When I started my law degree, I have no clue why, but a lecturer went round the seminar room and asked everybody to say what their parents did as their job. The list was something like “lawyer, lawyer, judge, accountant, doctor, lawyer, lawyer, lawyer, accountant”. I was three-quarters of the way around the room and could feel this dread as my turn approached. It got to me, and I said: “cleaner”.

The reaction of the room was to divert their eyes and almost feel slightly sorry for me. It's a memory that's very deeply etched into my mind. I was a teenager at this point and already feeling out of my comfort zone.

It has only been in relatively recent times that you can own who you are in law. The diversity that people bring to our industry is something that should be celebrated. Trying to not lose my roots to assimilate into a space is something that I have to challenge myself on pretty much every day.

But the stigma around social mobility, while it hasn’t gone, is going. For many firms – certainly for Simmons and Simmons – diversity is championed as being business-critical. If firms are not harnessing that, they will find the things our clients want from us in the not-too-distant future will be more and more challenging to deliver, and it will impact our bottom line. We all have our biases – that is a very human condition. My own experience means I work hard to challenge my own biases and ask whether my own approach to developing our teams is allowing everyone to thrive.

Image: Caroline with Deian Rhys, real estate partner in London.

When I talk diversity, I mean all the different diversities that make up individuals. I’m a mother from a working-class background. It's not just about gender, it's not just sexuality, it's not just ethnicity. It's all the things that are bound up in amongst ourselves that make us diverse.

People are utterly critical to what we do – we are the engine room. In the industry, I sometimes felt wellbeing was put in a bucket to one side – I was quite vocal about it. Our firm’s senior partner, Julian Taylor, had a very similar view to me and asked me to lead a wellbeing-focused part of our skills academy.

I said, “I'm a real estate lawyer. I don't think I have the expertise to do this”. He rapidly convinced me I was wrong – that I did have the expertise and that I could facilitate a conversation that can be quite challenging within law firms.

The characteristics that make us incredible lawyers – perfectionism, looking at what might happen in the future, being risk averse – can make us vulnerable to mental health challenges. That might be anxiety, impostor syndrome or the risk of burnout because we push ourselves.

I'm lucky that I absolutely love my job, but I also recognise it can take a lot from me. I love the adrenaline hit I get when I close a deal, even if it is at 2am. But it also means that the next day, I need a moment to reflect and to prioritise picking my son up from school. It’s important to open up those conversations.

I’m now global head of wellbeing. Having the personality I have, I tend to be a tree shaker. After I worked on the skills academy project, I still felt we weren’t doing enough. I now work on a policy that works alongside our business plan. We look at performance, profitability – all the things that make a business work. Wellbeing has to be a foundation to that. When I started out many years ago, the idea I would be looking at wellbeing strategy for an international law firm would have blown my mind. It's not for everybody, but the things you can do within the legal sector can be so much broader than the day job.

Our partner-specific wellbeing programme is a big priority. We're the people that set the values – and then hopefully live by those values. I believed that if we didn't give our partnership a space in which they could share their experiences and challenge what we're doing as a firm, they wouldn’t be as able to look after others. In some ways, there's no massive revolution – it's evolution. It's about small changes that feed the view that wellbeing should be intertwined into everything that we do.

When I got my first seat in real estate, as a trainee, I thought “You’ve got to be kidding me”. I landed in commercial property with no expectation it would be the future of my career. I absolutely hated property law at university and desperately avoided it as part of my LPC. But, as a trainee, I realised what I was doing was commercially driven negotiation. Generally, when someone comes to a real estate transaction, everybody wants the same result – and usually it’s one that's very positive.

I often say the firm’s Bristol office – which I lead – feels like my baby. That’s over-dramatic, but I remember walking in on day one when the office was set up in 2012, with just seven of us. It felt like looking at a blank canvas. I’ve been a part of building the culture, we’ve brought in some incredible talent, and I’ve seen how the partnership has grown to be very entrepreneurial.

I trained in the regions and I've never ever had a job in London. The firm received a lot of coverage in the legal press when it increased the salary for newly qualified solicitors in our Bristol office by 25%. It’s crucial to recognise that lawyers based in different regions of the UK are more than capable of delivering for this incredible sector.

This year, the Law Society is celebrating its 200th anniversary. To me, being part of the profession means being part of something that is bigger and greater than what we can be as individuals. It’s a massive privilege – and one that ought to be celebrated more often.