News - News - Impressive Gathering at BLD Launch

24 Feb, 2006

Black Lawyers Directory, BLD was officially launched on 23^rd February 2006 at the Law Society, 113, Chancery Lane, London on Thursday 23 February 2006 following a week of intense media coverage, including the Times. To view the photographs of the event, click here.

The gathering was impressive despite the dreadful weather conditions. Lawyers came together from the different strands of the profession including QCs, partners from some of the top 100 law firms, legal aid lawyers, lawyers from the public sector, charities and the not-for- profit sector and academia, diplomats, Chief Executives, HR and Marketing heads and managers, journalists and students.

Debo Nwauzu, founder of BLD and the Chief Executive and Managing Director of Totally Management Ltd which owns BLD opened the event. She spoke about her motivation for starting BLD and invited attendees to get listed on the site and inform at least 50 people on their mailing list to do the same and in turn encourage those 50 people to encourage 50 others and so on. She sets out her vision for BLD to be the most well-known and used black minority ethnic lawyers’ directory in the world.

John Lucy, Head of HR at Herbert Smith LLP also spoke and outlined Herbert Smith’s support and sponsorship for BLD as part of their strategy to have the brightest and the best lawyers in the firm. He acknowledged that "a diverse workforce is a vital ingredient" in Herbert Smith's success and outlined that at present 19% of their trainees and 12% of their associates are from ethnic minorities but they intend to increase this figure over time.

Courtenay Griffiths QC gave a passionate and rousing speech and declared that “the Black Lawyers Directory is not about us, but about them”. He said that whilst the statistics show that over half of the entrants into the legal profession are women and 20% are ethnic minorities, "to be blunt , you won't find those positive proportions in the parts of the profession where the big money is". He emphasised that many ethnic minority lawyers are concentrated in the less paid areas of work - publicly funded, criminal law, family immigration and employment. That “they” are finding that changes are necessary as failure to change will affect the bottom line as organisations are demanding information about diversity. That BLD will be used in the gathering of such information.