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Blogpost: "Blogging Against Disablism Day 2012" – my experience #BADD2012
The seventh annual Blogging Against Disablism day is today, on Tuesday, 1st May 2012. This is the day where all around the world, disabled and non-disabled people blog about their experiences, observations and thoughts about disability discrimination. In this way, we hope to raise awareness of inequality, promote equality and celebrate the progress we’ve made. I once wrote a post for the legal blog, Legal Cheek, describing the practical difficulties that disabled students like me, have in training contract interviews. But this is a different post!
I have often written on this blog about inclusivity and accessibility in relation to law and legal education; and I strongly recommend their twitter thread @legalcheek.
Actually, the firms on the whole are very good at making you feel comfortable for the interview. So much so you end up feeling very uncomfortable (as a result of the ‘Does he take sugar?’ syndrome). However, I would say almost too comfortable, in the sense that you do feel that the Partners concerned were taking meticulous care. In a sense, this is a case of ‘damned if you do, or damned if you don’t’.
My disability is multi-fold. I see double all the time, therefore I often voluntarily have to shut one eye to avoid seeing double. This is because I was in a coma for six weeks in the summer of 2007 due to meningitis. I now have also a cerebllar dysarthria (speech problem), but I am told that my speech is comprehensible. Secondly, I have trouble walking. I have a condition which is known as ataxia, which means I can easily go off balance, and I look as if I am mildly drunk. I find that London cabbies immediately know that I have ataxia, even if I hail a cab from outside a pub (I do not drink alcohol any more); they are very discerning, and, of course they have a right to refuse to pick you up if they wish and they can justify it. The handicap means I have to take it steady while walking (I won’t be doing the London Legal Walk 2012, but the organisers have kindly given me the chance to do sponsored tweeting for it, which makes me very happy as I volunteered for 5 months last year in a law centre in London in welfare benefits, as a law student approved to do the LPC).
I think for training contract interviews, some candidates do not even know that they require ‘reasonable adjustments’. I am very influenced by David Merkel, the lawyer in charge of the Law Society’s ‘Lawyers with Disabilities’ group. I went to their Christmas bash in 2010, and David told me, at a quiet moment aside, it was all about giving law students ‘a chance to show what they can add to a law firm, on a level playing field‘.This I feel is very true. Disabled citizens like me don’t like being made to feel ill, which they can sometimes do in the application procedure for training contracts. They’re not ill, they’re just different. Unfortunately, this Government, which stopped my Disabled Living Allowance without any warning or notification, makes me feel unwanted. I refuse to allow that perception of me, even if Katie Hopkins makes hurtful tweets like this. I cried for a bit after I read it, but with all due respect having completed my MBA recently I feel confident about business too, but in a different sense. I am 37, with several good postgraduate degrees, including in business, law and natural sciences, so I feel that I can bring value to society, even more than a popular TV show. Ironically, I feel @Lord_Sugar appreciates ‘value’ in business.
Finally, I am most grateful to @BADDTweets for alerting me to this, which is the Twitter stream for “Blogging Against Disablism Day”, run by @goldfish and @themanoutside (#bad2012): http://tinyurl.com/BADD2012. I particularly appreciate the chance to voice my experience of disability and disabilism here. All I can say to disabled and non-disabled citizens that it can be, in any context, very insidious and subtle. I am very lucky in that the law school I’m in does not “make me feel ill” (in any way you wish to interpret this legally or not!), but rather instead wanted and valued, and it is a joy to study my Legal Practice Course at BPP Law School, Holborn.
Annual Graham Turnbull essay competition on alternatives to imprisonment
Link: here
Law students, trainee solicitors, pupil barristers and junior lawyers are invited to enter the Law Society’s annual Graham Turnbull essay competition. This year’s essay title is: ‘In the light of the growing prison population should we look for alternatives to imprisonment?’ The deadline for entries is Friday 23 March 2012.
This is a very important, topical subject. I recently posted on a closely-related issue:
It is impossible to half-believe in rehabilitation
Legal aid cuts: justice for all?
This morning, @paulwaugh chaired a #fringe meeting at #Lab11, as part of a series of non-partisan panel discussions to promote awareness of the new Legal Aid and Sentencing Bill. He started off the morning’ proceedings by introduing a @soundoffjustice video about the personal impact of #legalaid cuts to begin, #lab11 #fringe. The panel this morning consisted of Lucy Scott-Moncrieff, Vice President of the Law Society, Steve Hynes from the Legal Action Group (Justice For All Coalition; please listen to @charonqc’c podcast), and Andy Slaughter MP (Labour MP for Hammersmith and Fulham). The event was hosted by DODS, and chaired by Paul Waugh (Editor of PoliticsHome.com).
The video presented the wider impact on children and families, explaining that these cuts were hitting the most vulnerable people in society, at their most vulnerable time. The presentation, consisting of personal stories, emphasized that the legal aids are not a ‘cost saving’ at all, and may end up costing money in the long run.
Steve Hynes explained that the campaign is highly dependent on parliamentaries. The video demonstrates the decimation of civil law, leading to 50% of the service disappearing. This gives the impression that the legal aids are in fact ideologically-driven. Steve explained the need for the campaign to pick its ground. Jackson never wished to preside over the reforms with the cuts occurring. The report from LJ Jackson indeed is very comprehensive as reported by @TheLawyerKaty. Medical negligence is one such area. Steve Hynes thinks that amendments are possible in social welfare for law, involving the higher tribunals, in the House of Lords. The Tories took the view that the higher tribunals were considering conflicts of facts, but Steve argued passionately that this is clearly not the case. Steve feel that it must come into scope. Jim Sandbach succeeded in a Liberal Democrat amendment, getting social welfare back into scope.
Their Lordships apparently understand the need for disabled people to have rights. There must be independence in legal aid entitlement, and reforms of the LSC could mean that ministers make judicial reviews of their own departments, which is a nonsense. There should be no bias in decision-making, which will affect the credibility of both ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ decisions. The Coalition considers that it must consider ‘exceptional cases’, but the reality is that 50% of the family living aid firms will be getting out of the legal aid system – it is therefore fine to talk about ‘exceptional cases’, but it is essential to consider what sort of network there is to support legal aid. Labour when it came into power had a vision of the ‘community legal aid service’, which Steve considers to be a good vision, which the ‘Justice for all’ coalition would like to be part of – Steve will fight for concessions, and needs to campaign for the future. This is about maintaining the ‘rule of law’ and can only be achieved through a civil system.
Lucy Scott-Moncrieff considered that ‘there is a hearty need for a good practical response’, but there should be a consideration of the social justice ideals underlying the debate. The proposed cuts undermine the rule of law; no-one is above the law, and the flip side is that nobody is outside the law. The European Court of Human Rights suggest that rights are ‘practical and effective, not theoretical and illusory’. Litigating should be a last resort, as it is complicated and uncertain. Going to lawyers is a good step because they can litigate, and the opposite side take the case more seriously. Non-lawyers do talk about their frustration. Children and adults under the age of 24 (@SoundoffJustice) need help. Lucy remarked that it is a good idea to get this publication off the Law Society website (the Law Society has a very active section of its website devoted to legal aid funding). Lucy cited an example of ‘even a 17-year old would be unable to get support’, ‘a person whose identity was stolen and experienced debt problems’, and ‘a student who was unable to access special educational needs’. Lucy also considered welfare benefits through the example of a person who had been given disability living allowance and needed the welfare benefits to prevent eviction – he did not have the legal and medical knowledge to represent himself optimally.
Furthermore, the criminal justice system also currently relies upon lawyers who can obtain the proper evidence. The Coalition has a responsibility to ‘will the means’, in addition to the rights. The Jackson Reforms must be borne in mind. Legal aid is only a benefit to a very small sample of society. There are lots of people who rely on ‘conditional fee agreements’ – the loser pays the winner costs, and now the winner has pay for his or her own costs. The purpose of damages is to put the person back to the pre-contractual position, but the person is still going to have to pay fees. The “telephone gateway system” does not appear to make intuitive sense, because a person may have difficulty in using a telephone (e.g. a person in ‘community care cases’ in care homes). Where are people going to go if the CAB sytem? They’re going to go to MP surgeries, or councilors. Sound off for justice are continuing to fight.
Lord Willy Bach explained that Labour never threatened the criminal law system as a Labour minister. As a criminal lawyer, Willy feels – in what he has now formulated as ‘the justice gap‘ – that the abolition of criminal law, getting early advice, is ridiculous – as legal aid is meant to address early intervention, upholding defendants’ rights. A lawyer should be able to say whether cases are nonsense, or whether they should progress. It’s practical and moral nonsense. What is the point of ‘rule of law’? The Bill is going to come to the Lords, but the Lords will do their best to mitigate against the effects of poor legislation. Lord Bach urged the need to support the @Soundoffjustice campaign, especially through the use of cros-bench peers or LibDem peers.
Andy Slaughter MP had just done a fringe meeting for the ‘Young Fabians’. The Bill does not have a prescriptive agenda, and is a sense an extension of what has gone before. It might have a rouse to cut the prison population. The Jackson Reforms will cost the public money. The AA have voted against the Jackson reforms, and this is interesting as motorists constitute a large group of consumers. Restricting access to justice, and tipping the system away from private defendants appear to be unfortunate consequences of the Bill when enacted, according to Andy, therefore all the campaigns promoting awareness of the legal aid cuts are worth supporting.
A paradigm shift is needed by law firms in understanding disability
‘Diversity’ is such a broad-ranging term, so as to be completely unhelpful. Far from promoting individuality, it clumps together people who are gay, black, bisexual, disabled, but draws the line at being male or female. Critically defining diversity has some bearing on whether you wish diversity groups to be safely ringfenced; or whether all ‘diversity individuals’ should be represented at all levels of a corporate. Whether or not a partner, who has a diversity issue, has time to making diversity part of the corporate culture or not is a moot point, or whether she or he gets paid extra and keeps work for this to a minimum to prevent its negative impact on targets and billable earnings, etc.
Lessons can be learned from another area so beloved of corporate legal marketing and recruitment departments. A highly seminal article on the different subject of corporate social responsibility (CSR) emerged from Porter and Kramer in 2006 in the Harvard Business Review. At this time, Porter and Kramer made a limited entrance into the discussion of CSR and corporate strategy, by structuring their discussion around reputation, sustainability / ‘people, planet, profit’, license-to-operate, and a few other associated issues. It is probably the article which has appeared from Harvard in 2011 that makes the most enduring impression of how CSR should be approached. Porter and Kramer introduce the notion of ‘creating shared value’, emphasising that a previous drawback of previous approaches – including their one – is that the corporation has been pitted against society. Of course, if the purpose of the company in English law is to maximise shareholder dividend, the issue of whether shareholders and directors have an alternative belief-set to other stakeholders becomes enormously relevant.
A similar criticism in my view can be made of the way that law firms approach disability. I am deciding not to hide this under the general term ‘diversity’. Michael Porter talks about the competitive advantage of businesses adopting CSR, such that your business is better than the competition. A lazy marketing solution would be to plaster your promotional literature with pictures of lawyers in wheelchairs, and get your firm to sign up to the aspirational but unenforceable Law Society Diversity and Inclusion Charter; and to concentrate on the profitability of your law firm instead. A more imaginative solution, in keeping with Porter and Kramer (2011), would be to acknowledge disabled individuals like myself as valued members of society. Whether or not you believe in multiculturalism, it is easily possible that a law firm, including the Magic Circle, could set up innovative professional legal services solutions regarding disability and employment issues in the corporate work force; they could make money out of this, indeed, and become more profitable in the process. More radical than making up numbers of the number of disabled candidates invited for interview, even.
I allude to this discussion briefly in a podcast I did with Alex Aldridge and Kevin Poulter this evening.
