 My name is Catherine Barnard, and I've been asked to briefly introduce this magnificent panel. The previous panel sort of focused on law at home. This panel is aiming at focusing on law abroad. In the broadest possible sense. Now part of my day job is as professor of European Union law. I'm also professor of employment law. So as I say, I do know what redundancy looks like. But in between all of the thought about my own precarious future, Brexit obviously is a very large issue on our agenda. But of course Brexit does not define the law faculty. And indeed the law faculty has a very long history of being open and welcoming to students from right across the globe. But also open and welcoming to academics from across the globe. And we have some fantastic contacts with other universities. And so the aim of this panel is to look at law through a broader prism. And to see what exciting things people can do with legal study. And what I hope this panel will look at is I'll tell you a little bit about the exciting things that they're doing with law. And also how they got to that point in time. So that we can be inspired. I'm going to hand the floor over to Nikki Padfield, who's my wonderful colleague. Who has just stepped down as being Master of Fitzwilliam. Not till Tuesday. My wonderful colleague, Nikki Padfield, who's on the point of stepping down as Master of Fitzwilliam. But also she is a professor of criminal law and criminology. And a passionate advocate of prisoners rights. And does a lot of work in respect of the European Convention on Human Rights. And she will be chairing the panel, moderating the panel, when she's not acting as child carer. Which is you might have seen she was doing with enthusiasm and she's just become a grandmother again this morning. So she's on very good form. Let me hand the floor over to Nikki and our wonderful panel. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you to Catherine for introducing the introducer in one sense. Yes, it was great to get a couple of somebody else's baby because I haven't cuddled my one yet. There we are. Thank you very much for bringing your baby. I think it enriches our event enormously that we have a baby here. But maybe that says more about me than all of you. But he does say something I think about multitasking. This panel discussion, women in the wider world is the sort of, I think, the alternative lawyers session. And one of the things which has amused me in the tea break is that it's been brought to my attention that there is no academic lawyer on the panel. So what's happened to academic law as women in the wider world? I'm delighted to say that Yvonne Cripps talked to me in the gap in the tea break. And Yvonne was the first university lecturer who was a woman in the law faculty. Who is a woman in the law faculty? And I was astonished to learn from Yvonne that she was appointed as a university lecturer only in 1985. 1985, ladies and gentlemen, was but yesterday. So yes, there's no complacency, I hope, in any of our discussions today. I told my panel that I wasn't nearly as efficient and hard working as Pippa. I wasn't going to orchestrate the sort of conversation that Pippa so cleverly orchestrated. I wasn't even going to introduce them. They're going to introduce themselves. I've given them five minutes each to say three interesting things. So please spot their three interesting things. And we'll go from there. And as long as I'm a little bit fierce and don't let them go very much over their five minutes, I think we'll have plenty of time for discussion. Pippa again said something about moderators being maybe assertive, maybe bossy, maybe formidable. Moderators also moderate websites, don't they? And they remove obscenities. So maybe I'm going to remove your obscenities this afternoon. Okay, enough from me, because it's going to be really fun hearing from you. I'm going to start with you, and we're going to start with you. Excellent. Who are you? So hello, everybody. My name is Claire Algar. I'm currently at Amnesty. And I guess I wanted to start without looking backwards too much, but just by saying I really loved that last session. And I'm delighted to be here, but also just want to lift up what Elaine was saying around all of us supporting and committing to do this stuff, because I know everybody here will either does at the moment or will do for people who are younger, get a constant barrage into inboxes inviting them to things. And like these are the ones that we all have to continue doing, because they're awesome. That was the first thing. The second thing which I loved was Sarah's point about the sort of support piece. And it reflected a party that I was at on Saturday, where I was talking to somebody and literally saying, when one's looking for a partner, usually at that stage in one's life, or possibly at any stage in one's life, one's thinking of kind of quick wit and facial symmetry. And what one is not necessarily thinking about is will this person dry shampoo my hair while I am asleep in 20 years' time. And what I say to you is if anybody is in that space, look at the person you are looking to commit to and ask that question, because if you are going to have the sort of life that hopefully we all will, then you need someone who's going to do that. So I thought what I would do was just sort of talk a little bit about my quite probably schizophrenic career in the hope that it might at least be a bit inspirational around completely changing what you do from one year to the next. So I started in the best possible way, and I'm not sure it's probably, well, may not be too late, but anyway, which was with Pippa as my director of studies at Keyes. That was fantastic. After that, I spent a year in the Deep South in Mississippi in Louisiana trying to stop people being executed. So I was working in a kind of law centre there. I was about 20, and it was a genuinely awesome experience because it was completely disruptive. I think very much in this country when you meet somebody, they can pretty much reverse engineer where you came from, who you are, which school you went to, whether you went to Cambridge or not. In Louisiana, that didn't happen, right? And I was also brought face to face with real obvious injustice in a way that my quite sheltered upbringing hadn't brought me face to face with to date. And so I guess one of the things that I'm saying is try to do something sort of, if possible, at the beginning of your career for those who are there, try and do something that is sort of out there and will put a pin in what really a very steep learning curve looks like. So that was that. I then returned, and I had a training contract with a lovely firm, a small corporate firm called Collier Bristow. I was there for 10 years. I was an intellectual property litigator. I made partner at 28. It was a very small firm. And that was awesome. It was a really fun time. But I think maybe the coming up, I don't know, there's something around 10 years maybe or I don't know, for me there was anyway. My clients were Caligas, EasyJet and Philip Morris. And it felt to me as though I maybe could be doing more to save the world. And also at that point, Guantanamo was kind of a zyggeist-y piece. And I thought well I could leave Collier Bristow and try to do something about Guantanamo. And so I joined as executive director a very small then organization called Reprieve. And I stayed there for eight years. And that was a completely terrifying change, right? Because I was partner in a firm. I had a great network of lovely people who sent me work and who knew me. My identity was Claire, who was this kind of young corporate lawyer person who was doing quite well. And going from that to, I remember actually when I was off of the job and the point that someone was making here around thinking of calling and turning it down, I was sort of there going, okay I know nothing about running an NGO. I really don't know very much about human rights law. I don't know anything about managing a staff of 50 people. And I guess the thing that I would say is you would be astonished at how many transferable skills you have. And so even if what you do is intellectual property litigation, it is possible to change from that to doing something that feels utterly different. Anyway, I did that for eight years. It was great. We got quite a lot of people out of Guantanamo. We did some very good stuff on the death penalty. Probably the best thing was trying to stop drug companies from supplying drugs to death row that they would use in executions. And then from there, I made probably the less dramatic change of moving on to Amnesty International. And I'm there now. I'm the director for research advocacy and policy, which is an amazing job. And I guess the thing that I would say is working at a tiny start-up where you can be agile and do amazing things is one thing. And then working in a much, much bigger organisation has its own challenges, but also has amazing things. So I spent one day where I went to Denmark, and you may be surprised to hear the rape law in Denmark is based on violence rather than consent. Because I was at Amnesty and because it was the Danish government, I went to Denmark and said, you should change this law. And they said, yes, you are absolutely right. We will do that. The campaigning didn't actually have to be that considerable, but it was based on amazing research that we had done with survivors and lifting up their voices and so forth. But because it's Denmark, they will then put an education piece in around what consent means, and that could actually change the entire culture of a country around sexual violence. So there is amazing stuff you can do in very big organisations. That is one day. The other 364 have been internal management. So just, you know, just moderate expectation, I guess, if you're looking at that. So that's all I'm going to say about careers. I'm starting to cough. Yes. Three things really quickly. First one, play to your strengths. And I don't know if this is a gendered thing. I'm not sure it is necessarily. But you have an appraisal and people say, you're amazing at this, you're amazing at this, you're amazing at this, and you need to work on this. And you go away and you think about this. And actually, like, try and do this and delegate this because it's much easier doing the stuff that you're great at and that you love. And I'm just going to finish. I'll leave this like one. The other one I want to finish with is around a plea around equality, I guess. Which I just feel we should all finish. We should all sort of do whenever we have any kind of platform. Obviously this one is around, this whole thing is around equality and we should all fight for that in any way we can. But we should also fight for, we should fight against discrimination around sexuality and identity and race and class and the intersectionality of those pieces and we should all do that as much as we can and we should all tell everybody else whenever we have a platform to do that as much as we can. Thank you. Thank you very much. You're not glad to clap because we're running out of time. I wouldn't want to spontaneity or anything. Sally, Stock is running. Okay, hi. I'm Sally Boyle. The three things that I really want to talk about in telling my story are around confidence, particularly in terms of having a non-Lillia legal career, which I have definitely had. The second thing I really want to just remind everybody of is that during the course of your careers you really need to take risk and look for opportunities too and I'll talk about that a little bit more. And then thirdly, and this has been mentioned by many of the first panellists, is the importance of, in my case, managers, sponsors and mentors in helping me navigate what has been a very non-Lillia career. So just to give you my story, I came to Cambridge Red Law, met my husband was the first set of women at Queens College which was an extraordinary experience in itself. I can talk about that later. And then went to London to be an article clerk. This was in the 80s when they were still called article clerks at a London law firm. And I was married very young and wanted to have a young family whilst I was still in my 20s, so fell pregnant and told my boss who was a woman, an employment lawyer, that I wanted to leave and be at home with my children. And her reaction was, you'll be crazy Sally, you'll be bored out of your mind. And so I said, well, I'd quite like to give it a go, Janet. And she said, no, I'm not going to let you. She said, you are going to do a masters in employment law and industrial relations by distance learning and you're going to help me write a book on the contracts of employment. I'm seven months pregnant. How on earth am I going to do this? Anyway, sure enough, I had a Caesarean section. My husband arrived with flowers and six books that have come from Leicester University and the course started. So the first essay God alone knows what I talked about because I just was in a fog of breastfeeding and everything else, but anyway, got it done and true to her word my boss said to me, I'll accept the fact you want to take this break and I'm treating this as a break but I'm going to keep in touch with you. And so every six months she came and had a coffee with me or she invited me to go and have lunch with her in the city or whatever. And so we then moved to Cambridge. My husband's job moved us to Cambridge. Janet still came and four years in, you know, I'm still not working, I've completed my masters. And at that point a number of my friends had made partner in their respective law firm. So I was going down to London to drink champagne and my friends kept saying to me, you are not ever going to get back into the law. You've been out of it too long, you know, you will never get back. I'm like, well, okay, I'm ready to get back to work. So I just had to sort of maintain my own confidence that I would get back to work. And to be fair, Janet had said to me, I want you to call me, you know, when you are ready to come back. So the summer when my children went to primary school here, I remember sitting in the garden in Cambridge with a whole bunch of lovely NCT new mothers and talking about nipple cream and crack nipples and stuff. I thought I need to get back to work. And actually in fact we'd also been to a dinner party that weekend where somebody had introduced me to a guest as they didn't even use my name, they didn't say it Sally, they just said this is Karim's wife and Adam and Ollie's mummy. And I thought, oh my goodness, I've lost my identity. I really need to get back to work. So sure enough I called Janet and she said absolutely and I said but I need to come back part time, Janet, because I can't do this full time commute to London, my husband's a junior barrister treading all over the country to defend and prosecute criminals. So you should find that's fine. I know you. I think it'll be okay. We're not going to tell anybody in the firm that you're part time. We're not going to tell clients that you're part time. You need a full time nanny and you'll have to be flexible. I'm like okay, that's all fine. So I went back to work part time and interestingly it was actually the most difficult part in my career because working part time, balancing work with play, no technology, this is still in the early 90s although a computer had landed on my desk when I arrived back at the office which I didn't know what to do with. But in any event it was quite tough but I managed to juggle it until Janet said to me look you're going to have to go full time in order to be a partner in the firm. And actually her observation of me was that I had really lost my confidence when I first came back to the office I remember saying to her don't give me any clients I don't want the phone to ring, I don't know anything which is selling, you know what's happened to you and I said no no no Janet I really don't know anything. Anyway after six months I sort of got back into it but as she asked me to go full time I said I'm just not ready to do that. So I turned to Cambridge and thought it would be easier if I could work in Cambridge so I was offered a job at Mils and Reeve a local law firm here which was a great opportunity to do very different work work with the Cambridge University and a lot of NHS trusts instruct Mils and Reeve a great very different practice and it was fantastic for me because I could take my children to school every morning I could meet them after work after school and be home from work Mils and Reeve actually had an hour and a half for lunch so I could do my Sainsbury shop during lunchtime it's great but I eventually realised that actually from a career perspective I would like to get back to the city and this is when I took some risk but also my network of friends who I had maintained in the city was really important because I called a bunch of people and said I'd really like to come back to the city and so they put my name forward for various jobs one of which was to be the first employment law in-house lawyer at Goldman Sachs I didn't know what an in-house employment lawyer would do I had no idea when I went for the first interview but actually as I had more and more interviews with Goldman Sachs 32 in total absolutely extraordinary across in London and in New York I realised that this was going to be a very interesting job they'd never had an employment lawyer in Europe before basically Americans had set up the offices in every country you can imagine American style with an offer letter that had one paragraph and no reference whatsoever to any employment laws in any country in which we were operating so I joined and it was a fantastic opportunity we'd had a race discrimination claim in the mid 90s which had gone down very poorly and it was obvious that they needed quite a lot of help in getting themselves in shape so I very quickly built a team around me and made managing director and in fact it was very interesting when I made managing director because my boss was a woman there as well and she had said to me right from the start I don't care where you work Sally you live in Cambridge, you've got two small boys you just do the work on the train whatever I don't mind if you leave early when I made MD one of my male colleagues came into the office and said to me Sally you know we're really surprised we are really surprised that you've made MD I said oh thanks very much Robert and he said he said well you don't work as hard as we do and I said how do you know that Robert and he said well you don't you leave the office at quarter past six every night and I said yes I do and I get on the train at quarter to seven and I work for an hour till quarter to eight I have supper with my family and then my husband and I sit and work until we're ready to go to bed because he's always preparing a case for the next day etc and then I work for the hour on the train coming back in the morning so you don't see me working but I am working and it was such an interesting observation of sort of face time and the way in which my male colleagues work versus the empowerment that actually my boss had given me to do the work wherever so yes ok my final my final transition which really was from law now to HR was ten years into my job at Goldman Sachs I was asked to become the HR director in Europe and this was the day actually Lehman Brothers went down I thought I was actually going to be asked to make everybody redundant because I was the employment lawyer and in fact I was asked to be the head of HR and my reaction was I don't know anything about HR and the two CEOs said you will be fine you can learn the job but you've got really good skills that we need you communicate well lawyers are great influencers you're analytical and critical thinkers that's what we need in our HR director so you don't feel you have any choice when you're offered that sort of job so I took it was quite reluctant to leave the law particularly as my father had always wanted me to be a lawyer so I didn't tell him for three months that I'd taken this job but it has been an extraordinary opportunity to do something very different use my legal skills be a director of the bank promote diversity inclusion, mental health all sorts of topics which we've talked about today so a great opportunity a bit of a risk but a great opportunity Thank you very much indeed Lucy your clock is running I'll be very brief, good at being brief so the first question that Catherine asked was how did we get here and I got here because of Nicky because I applied to Cambridge and they were very clever because they rejected me and pulled me in the pool and Nicky took me out of the pool and interviewed me and gave me a place and then was my supervisor for three years or some of that three years so thank you Nicky because this was the beginning of my journey I like Claire also when I left Cambridge wanted to save the world and I spent in my gap year after university I went to work for the UN and went to work for the European Commission and I thought as an intern thinking these were the organisations that made significant change and I was going to make significant change in them and I realised when you're 21 you actually can't do anything at all so I went to become barrister and my grandmother had been a barrister and she was a great inspiration to me so I was a barrister for 17 years and then I never really lost that desire to make a change in society I had two kids and I looked at them and I thought it's really important that I bring them up and ensure that they are good people and amazing children but I want to do more than this and so I thought of lots of different things I applied actually to be a commissioner on the social mobility commission and foolishly they interviewed me but I had absolutely no skills for this job at all or any experience and so quite rightly I didn't get the job and actually I thought the only way that I can make a difference and the best way that I can make a difference is to become an MP so I very thankfully got selected to an amazing seat just around the corner in Southeast Cambridge and I think being an MP is one of the best ways the most worthwhile ways to make a difference in society it's fantastic being a backbench MP I feel that through most of the work that my staff have done we've changed people's lives on an individual basis but I've been a minister for two years I was a they keep giving me justice jobs because they think I've got some expertise in that area so I was a junior justice minister responsible courts and court reform and legal aid it's then very honoured to be appointed as the Solicitor General but politics moves very quickly so after two months I was promoted to be a ministry of state again in the ministry of justice and I'm now responsible for prisons and probation so my three takeaways are firstly support support is really important it's really important to support others and it's really important to take support just to tell you a very quick story I mentioned my grandmother my grandmother was a barrister until she was 80 and she had two young children that came to do her gardening they were Indian children she lived in a very Indian populated area in Leicester and they didn't speak very much English and she taught them English went after the gardening and when she died one of the boys wrote to my father and he said I am now a banker in Hong Kong and I would never have done this without the support of your mother, my grandmother so those two boys they took support they took support from a very very unusual source I'm sure many of your mentors or have been mentees I think we need to take support wherever we can do it it's a lesson I learnt as an MP very early on when we were first elected some cabinet ministers and ex cabinet ministers said to us all you will go up and you will come down and you have to be nice on the way up and you need to be nice on the way down because you will see the same people on the way up and on the way down and you can see that now you can see cabinet ministers who have become cabinet ministers and then back bench MPs and then cabinet ministers again and we need to be nice to everyone and support them and look out for them my pupil masters David Anderson I was obviously his pupil and then the next time I saw him I was on the Investigatory Powers Bill Committee and at the time he was the security advisor to the terrorism advisor to the government so I was cross-examining him as a member of the Bill Committee so you see people in your life in different ways and I think it's just really important to continue those relationships which will serve you well throughout your careers my second takeaway is do it you know when you apply to become an MP you have to first get on your party's list and I'm told by the woman amazing woman who used to be the chair of the candidates list that when you apply to conservative central office for the form to fill in to go on the list which is the first step of becoming an MP when they send that list to a man it's returned within 48 hours and when they send that application form to a woman it's returned 14 months later and as mentioning this to actually a group of women recently in a panel event and one of the women said to me that's because women are some people think it's that someone said earlier that we don't necessarily think we're good enough and we're thinking I can't do all those those criteria on the application form but I think it's something else as well we as women are thinking can I juggle my career do I want this job am I going to do all the other things that I want to do bringing up a child at the same time as doing this very busy job that's going to take up my time so my answer to that is if you want to do it just do it and tell you a story about that when I became a candidate I went round the constitution don't worry Nikki I've only got one more point left I became a candidate in southeast Cambridgeshire I spent 18 months I stopped taking cases as a barrister and I spent 18 months going to the constituency spending all my time then speaking to potential constituents and I was at a WI event and I was probably about a year in to this and I had two children they're now for 14 and 11 so they were probably eight and sort of five at the time and one of the women I was telling what I did and one of the women said to me what do your children think about you doing this I thought do you know what I don't really know what they think about me doing this I decided this is what I wanted to do I worked very hard as barrister but I was a good mum I was there for most of my well probably all of the children's events but I'd never really thought about what they thought about me being an MP so I went home and I said to Jacob who was my oldest child at the time Jacob you know what do you actually think about me being an MP and he said I'm really proud of you mummy you're not always proud now but I think sometimes we hold ourselves back and those people who love us do want us to do what we want to do and my third point is and this is a very brief point but it's two points really but it's still very very brief so my third point is enjoy it and ask yourself will it matter in ten years time and I'm going to explain that a bit further so enjoy it and tell you a little bit of a story about that so I first met Boris Johnson when I was first elected in 2015 and I was on a table and it was a fundraising event and Boris Johnson came up to our table and the people who were I was the recently elected MP for South East Cambridgeshire and everyone else on the table was from BT and they worked for BT so Boris came up to the table and he was introduced to everyone and he came up to me and he said so what do you do in BT and the host of the table said Boris this is Lucy Fraser and she's just been elected as the MP for South East Cambridgeshire and his face just absolutely fell and he didn't know what to put it on and every time he saw me off there went South East Cambridgeshire, Lucy Fraser so when you make mistakes I think we always have to I always say to myself will it really matter in 10 years time sometimes we eat ourselves up with things that we should have done we should have said things we should have gone for we didn't do that quite right and I think for minor things it doesn't really matter it won't matter in 10 years time so move on, get on with it move on to the next thing but whilst you're on this journey enjoy it because sometimes we're always reaching out for that goal and that goal is fulfilling so I have to enjoy the journey as well Straight on to Katerina Hello, I'm Katerina Gould and I'm an executive coach now with my own practice thinking potential and in terms of talking about my career and how law has featured in it I'm slightly embarrassed to say it hasn't really featured apart from my three years at Cambridge because I read law really as a route into the business world I didn't have a particular direction I wanted to go in but law seemed to be a good starting point and following my law degree I worked in the city I worked in healthcare I worked in media I did an MBA at Harvard and came to the point where I had two young children and a sick elderly mother and I couldn't continue so I actually stopped working for eight years and then in going back to work I retrained as an executive coach through doing a psychotherapy introduction and I've been working as an executive coach working with people in professional services financial services retail and FMCG people aspiring to be leaders people who are new into leadership role people who want to become leaders and people who are leaders and finding it quite lonely and challenging and one of the subsets of people that I was interested in was my peer group of professionally qualified women who were at the point of wanting to return to careers if they'd taken a break and just finding it almost impossible even if they had the confidence even if they had the contacts the routes into organisations were just not there so together with a similarly minded colleague we co-founded and we were directors of women returners which does what it says on the tin it works with organisations that want to provide routes back into the workplace for professionally qualified women and women who are looking to return we started in 2012 with just becoming a resource for women gathering all the kinds of information that just wasn't available before then in one single place and 2014 we started our first programme which was actually taking the model that was invented by Goldman Sachs of a Returnship which is like an adult internship and we introduced it into the UK we had three programmes in 2014 and by last year 2018 there were 68 programmes so this idea of women being not on the scrap heap if they've left their careers is fading for the women as well as the organisations that want to employ them and it's gaining traction across multiple sectors and it's doing something for equality in a small way and gender pay gap and all those other things that we are all so concerned about I've actually stepped away from being director of that business because I had another interest that I wanted to pursue which is as well as doing my coaching and I've got a couple of board roles I'm training as a psychotherapist and I'm in sort of that next stage of my career which leads me to my first takeaway which is to build on something Priya said earlier about careers being a jungle gym rather than a lado phrase that was used by Charles Sandberg in her book Lean In which I think a number of us have referred to even if not directly in what we've been saying ladders is limiting I mean I know we heard a panel of women before us many of whom have succeeded in climbing the ladder but pretty much you can only go up down or sideways and there's only one route pretty much whereas in a jungle gym if you think about that analogy it's a much more creative way of thinking about building your career you can go up you can go sideways you can go down you can pause for a bit and in all the things that you're doing you're taking building blocks that you will ultimately use in whatever it is you then end up doing and there are many routes to get to where you want to get to the second point I also want to pick up on something that was mentioned in the first panel which is we have to make this not a women's issue we have to engage the other half of the population and it's in action and not just in talking there was a research carried out by women returners together with PWC in 2016 which discovered that if the career break penalty was addressed i.e women can come back into the workplace and come back at a level that they would have been if they hadn't stepped out it could have an overall economic impact of 1.7 billion on the economy and there's also a social point to this in terms of the society we want our children to grow up in and the equality that we want them to be able to take part in so I've got two practical examples of how to engage men if you're thinking of how to possibly do this my alma mater and Amanda's as well simple's girls school created initiative called dads for daughters it's based on the he for she model where the fathers were invited to the school and were talked to about these issues and were invited to pledge to achieve greater gender equality and that's now spread to many other schools and even some businesses have now adopted it there's also a very recent example of something called the 50-50 project at the BBC which was led by Rose Atkins of Outside Source who's a fantastic journalist and that was very simply to achieve a balanced gender representation in front of the camera and they reached 50% balance men and women in only four months simply by actually just counting and monitoring the balance and in putting attention on it and being a bit more creative and thoughtful about who they're inviting onto the panels this project has now been adopted by 500 different departments and teams across the BBC the final thing I want to say from my career and from the work that I've done is that if you are pausing your career and you're thinking about it or I would see there's some younger people in the room if they're thinking I'm just starting out of my career but I don't know how it's going to take me don't assume any more that if you pause your career that that's the end of it thanks to women returners and others Dana's original business obelisk law also promotes opportunities for women or people who want to have sex to be in the law there's lots of organisations which are now actively supporting returning to the workplace and employers are much more open to considering returners than they were in 2012 when we started thank you very much indeed so we didn't know if he was when I was on the train coming I decided that I wouldn't because if I told them and I got in I would always think it was because they felt sorry for me so I came to the interview I did my best I thought I was dreadful and I was astonished to be accepted and I recall that when I started at Cambridge I still didn't know if my father was alive or dead and that was I don't know nine months later something like that and eventually my mother rang again from Nigeria to say that one of my father's school friends had rung her he was a military doctor and he had been sent to treat a patient who was dying in a military hospital because the government were afraid that they were about to kill they treated him in a way which was about to kill him basically so he was astonished when he turned up at this military hospital to find his old school friend who was my father my father was about six foot five and by the time this military doctor saw him he weighed about eight stone and he had been tortured and all his hair had gone grey because of fear presumably and I remember the first time I saw him after his release when I hugged him I could feel every vertebrae down his back because he was so thin and that is why when on Tuesday morning I was in the CPS office with my colleagues watching the BBC with that slightly out of sync coverage with Baroness Hale reading out the judgement my heart was bursting with pride that I have become a lawyer in a country where there is the rule of law because what happened to my father is what happens when the rule of law disappears so I don't want to offend Lucy because you are a really nice lady but it makes my blood boil when I hear people say that they are having fun with what's going on in Parliament at the moment I'll try not to make it too political alright but I think that's not about politics about decency and integrity and treating people well so back to Lucy Cav I had the great honour to be taught by Nicky Padfield and when I saw Nicky's name pop up on my email the other week I was just thrilled because she was one of the few people who taught me rather than talked at me for an hour telling me how clever they were and funny stories about their cases she really helped me understand constitutional law and as I was hearing the judgement listening to it at work I thought she's the reason I understand all this and I'm so pleased I'm going to see her at the end of the week so anyway I had a really fantastic time at Lucy Cavendish at the bar and was in chambers for eight years actually I can take this off now can't I it doesn't work just set it full to the ground and then can you tell me when I've got two minutes left thank you I'll be telling you quite quickly really really quickly I went to chambers I didn't get on with the clogs I didn't get them, they didn't get me I decided to work with the CPS in 2006 I worked there for a few months and then I was made the head of the unit I was working in which is very nice and then from there this is a truncated history then from there I went to the home office and worked in the UK central authority where my love of all things international law began from there I worked as a second international expert in the European Commission and I had a very happy time there until the 16th of June when the referendum result happened and my husband and I had to move back to London because I was no law and required so after working in Brussels I came back to London worked for a year in the home office legal strategy unit of the international directorate and after that then I got my current job which is as a specialist prosecutor in the special crime and counter terrorism division of the Crown Prosecution Service and I really really love my job and part of the reason I love it because I work with fantastic people who are really supportive and who are kind and they're funny and they bring cakes and all of that but also because I feel that I'm empowered to do the right thing I don't have any pressure on me to charge as many people as possible I just have the pressure to do the right thing make the right legal judgement don't charge people against whom there's not enough evidence and where there's a public interest in prosecuting them now really quickly my three takeaways are find a workplace in which you can be who you really are and I think the sort of management jargon is that be authentic bring the whole of you to work because I work for quite a long time every day and I think it would be terribly difficult to be somebody else the second thing is be brave and I find it quite hard to be brave but I think I remember Hillary Clinton saying dare to compete dare to apply for that job even if you reject it only yesterday I got a rejection from the judicial appointments council and I'd like to speak to you about that that's networking be honest to yourself about yourself and be honest to other people about who they are stand up for yourself and I think that can take a lot of courage but do it and nothing bad happens when you tell people no or you can't speak to me like that do it in a polite and assertive way and I just say be brave the third thing is embrace your vulnerability I suffer quite badly from depression and it's I feel a bit ashamed to talk about it but I'm going to talk about it anyway because it makes me feel that I'm incompetent and that I'm not able to manage my life properly because I have these periods where I just feel death would be better than how I'm feeling and that means that I can't really function terribly well when I'm in that place so I have to be clear with myself that I can't play rough when I can feel it coming on what I need to do is to rest so I need to tell people I need to take a bit of time off I don't care what the case is because actually the alternative for me is worse than losing the case and so I have learned to embrace that vulnerability and I think it helps me to have compassion about other people who are having a tricky time particularly at work I'm very lucky I have a really happy relationship with my husband who funnily enough is Danish and my experience is that it's not always so easy to persuade the Danes thank you talking now coming at the end almost the end Bella is going to have the book end job it's quite hard on my level because people have said a lot of things so I thought I'd start with saying ok I'm a woman I'm a lesbian I'm a mother I've got an ex-husband I'm a lawyer I'm a child and athletic fan and over the years all those things have been more or less important and I've balanced some of them much more than others I undoubtedly have allowed myself to be defined by my work Keelan will know that and over the years and sometimes I have also had mental health issues where I have let my personal life or decisions become too much and I've had to take time away and when you've had that experience once I think you learn you can learn from it and it makes you actually a slightly more kinder person on yourself which is something just to remember in all of this anyway I'm going to try and feed my points into a little bit of career things I did a cell win for two years I did my part once in history I had no idea what I was going to do getting to Cambridge and reading history was enough for me for quite a long time and then suddenly I thought what am I going to do so I switched to law in the days when it was quite easy to do so I did two years here I did my part two followed the pack down to Guildford and then ended up in the city in a law firm going I don't fit in at all I have no idea what all this law is or most of it a corporate commercial I thought for some reason the first seat they put me in was a probate and trust seat for rich people and I sort of very quickly started learning actually about myself and my first sort of takeaway point really was about which has come out from people personal authenticity you have to work out who you are and what you want and what you don't mind fighting for and what you don't give a fuck about actually and I sort of realised I really didn't give a fuck about money and banking and all that stuff I just didn't and I used to even in those days I used to be a guardian reader which for those of you who have read the Bible will know that's where I am now as a lawyer but I used to put the guardian I used to read the guardian but going into the office up the lifts in Aldermanbury Square I used to put the guardian inside my jacket because everybody else was reading other newspapers that were obviously far better than the one I was reading and I started realising I was different and that was part of a process for me coming out as well I got married I had kids but over the years I sort of realised that actually I was gay and I just needed to get on with it and it wasn't so bad telling my parents was not the enormous awful thing I thought it was going to be even though I was sort of 33 a latecomer to things but knowing yourself sorting out yourself there are different jobs everywhere for all of us and if you're lucky you find the right one for you so having gone into the city and going oh god I don't like this there's a lot of blind alleys you go down but no blind alley is a wasted alley you learn things you learn what you don't like and sometimes that's as important and there are some people who are fantastic and know from a very early age what they do like I didn't really know that until I went there I applied for various jobs nothing really tempted me and then I saw an advert one day for the BBC as a litigation lawyer which is what I qualified as a civil litigation lawyer and I thought the BBC that sounds fantastic so I went off there the chap who was running it at the time was an ex Cambridge law graduate who liked a bit of drink at lunchtime and it was all quite quiet there was no such thing as media law it just wasn't there in those days and so I went there as a litigator they just fought and lost panorama's maggies maggies militant tendency for those of you who remember it Neil Hamilton and a lot of sorts of Nazi salutes and they were just trying to get their house in order in something that was a developing area so I was very lucky because I sort of picked it up as it happened and I've stayed that's where I've stayed I've stayed as an in-house media lawyer I popped out for a couple of years taught at the College of Law on the solicitors course and did a year of teaching crime only thanks John Spencer for everything I knew about about crime so you can imagine where my bench was on that side but I came back went to the Times I've worked the BBC, I've worked for the Times I've worked for The Sun and the News of the World and The Guardian and that sort of takes it to my second point which is that getting to The Guardian I actually was always a sort of dream but I thought I'd never get there because by that I was in my mid 50s at late early 50s at the Times my boss was only a couple of years older than me I couldn't really see any progression there and the main lawyer at The Guardian was younger than me so you sort of go okay just stay where you are you're quite happy working for Murdoch we'll part that I'm still doing media free speech open justice stuff which I have come to value and then the person at The Guardian decided that they were going off to Ofcom and having a different career route and suddenly this door opened that I thought was shut and so I went there got interviewed got the job I'm still there for good or bad and you know I've had a fantastic time I think one of the themes is we all love our jobs from what I gather I've had super injunctions I've had WikiLeaks, Snowden panorama papers all sorts of things and they just come at you and how much law I do as opposed to strategy with a little bit of law lurking in the background I don't know but you know the great thing about the law is there are lots and lots of nooks and crannies for all sorts of people who are not quite straight line lawyers that solicitors and barristers practices allow you to be and so I just say you know just don't think about it in narrow terms there's masses of opportunity there and so don't be afraid to go off piste is my second message if you hadn't picked that up and the third thing and the only other thing I was going to say which is picking up on something that's already been said I also sit as a part-time employment tribunal judge I've done it for 20 years I don't practice in employment law it doesn't matter and there is an enormous amount of opportunity for people particularly women particularly solicitors in the tribunal system and it's a way up as well and so I really would encourage people to think about that as a possible thing you can do it in parallel as part-timers so that's thank you very much Bella it's a warm audience fantastic hi everyone I'm Bella Sankey and I am like everybody on these fantastic panels today a privileged graduate law graduate from Cambridge University I'm here because of provise Chancellor Professor Eilish Farran and Professor Mark Elliott who's lurking on the back seat on the back row over there you may have heard him on the today program this morning and I'm really honoured to be here and I'm really pleased and really delighted that alongside a panel of brilliant practitioners there was a decision to put on a panel like this today we talked a bit about imposter syndrome in the last panel and as somebody who studied law but has made my career at the kind of intersection of law and politics and doing civil society work I often feel a bit like a fraud and not like a real lawyer and so yeah it was really good to open up that discussion and also to have a panel that recognises the achievements of people with legal qualifications and legal training that decide to make their work kind of elsewhere other than the courtroom my first message I think my first kind of takeaway point is that when you have a legal education and legal training particularly an institution like this you can be incredibly important I think and a powerful tool for good pursuing public interest causes and working in civil society we have in this country a very lively, very robust and brilliant civil society I think that's really grown up over many decades probably not least since the 19 act which allowed women to operate with a legal education in all parts of civil life and we have I think a very flexible constitution but a constitution that is made more robust and even stronger by having an active civil society that will take test case litigation and that will challenge government and hold government to account protecting the rights of minorities and protecting our democracy in so doing so that's where I've made my career I spent a long time working at Liberty the National Council for Civil Liberties I worked at Reprieve and I'm currently the director of a national charity called Detention Action that supports people being held in immigration detention centres in the UK and campaigns for fundamental reform and throughout my career I have worked on a lot of exciting but also I think very important causes and campaigns to further human rights protection in the UK whether it's resisting the Blair government's infringements of civil liberties and attempts to extend pre-charged attention to 90 days then 42 days pre-charged attention bingo at one point it was guess your limit or whether it was working to ensure that identity cards that were also being brought in by a kind of authoritarian push back in the early 2000s were ultimately scrapped I worked to ensure that modern day slavery was criminalised not as long ago as it should have been and to ultimately save the Human Rights Act from repeal from a coalition and then a conservative government that was held bent until pretty recently on scrapping the act and pulling us out of the European Convention so there is exciting and as I say important work to be done and that work is done most often in the Parliament chamber when you work in civil society as I say test case cases that you can work on and that you can initiate which are incredibly important but I've actually seen first hand how important it can be to win battles in the Parliamentary Chamber and when you do so although you have to be patient and you have to be prepared to be in for the long haul the win and the gain is incredible because you have at a stroke managed to change the lives potentially of hundreds if not thousands of people or ensure that hard edge protections have been written into the law that will hold government to account and will ensure that people's rights are respected my second point today I think is that while we are here celebrating an extraordinary and a brilliant anniversary I think it's really important as women and as human beings to remember that while huge gains and strides have been made in the last hundred years we have so much further to go and there are still glaring injustices in the UK today and as we sit here this afternoon I don't want to bring the mood right down but I do want to remind people that currently there are thousands of people sat in immigration detention centres sat there indefinitely with absolutely no time limit any of them survivors of torture survivors of human trafficking not knowing when they're going to be released and being re-traumatised and oppressed in a country that prides itself and having a tradition of freedom a tradition of tolerance a tradition of welcoming people that are fleeing persecution and yet in 2019 we still lock people up indefinitely another issue that I wanted to mention because it is a day to celebrate women and women's rights is that right now in the UK if you want to go to your GP or you want to go to a midwife appointment as I did not so very long ago you will be asked at your first appointment with a midwife to hand over your immigration status and to declare your passport number and it is because of that hostile environment and that policy that there are pregnant women right now in the UK not seeking medical advice and not getting antinatal appointments and I know that I owe my own life and my daughter's life to the NHS and had I not sought an appointment like that we might not be here today so I say that just to remind people that there are so many fights particularly fights for women but fights for all of us that need to still be taken and still be won my final message I think is one of hope and I want to focus on the positive as I finish up and I think that it will take female practitioners female women working in the wider world and some men as well to carry on taking those fights and winning those fights and that we need to be bold and we need to work together hand in glove in order to ensure that the gains the last hundred years are built upon and that we don't go backwards as is so easy to do in a parliamentary democracy albeit one very much under the rule of law but that those battles need to be fought and taken and that we need to work collaboratively as women and as people to make those gains to give you one example of some work that's currently ongoing that I think really demonstrates how women and men working together working together can achieve that sort of change is work that's going on right now around the immigration bill which as a result of Tuesday's Supreme Court judgment is still live in Parliament and that's work that I've been doing with a number of immigration law practitioners senior women in their profession women like Stephanie Harrison and Laura Dubinsky ministers like Janet Farrell about Murphy to try and put a time limit in place on immigration detention we drafted a beautifully crafted robust amendment which we're hoping to attach to the immigration bill and then I've been working with senior women across the political parties in Parliament so some of Lucy's colleagues and the Conservative party people like Caroline Spelman and other good conservatives SNP members like Joanna Cherry who is now I think a household name sorry I'll finish up Harriet Harman, Diana Abbott and that amendment has been tabled to the bill it at the moment stands to win if the bill ever gets to report stage in the House of Commons and it's by cross-party endeavour it's by using legal skills but also using negotiating and diplomatic skills to achieve positive change that we have come to this point we're really close but we're still also really far but I want to leave you with that message of what can be done and hope for the future thank you thank you very much I make absolutely no apology for having taken ten minutes of your tea break who have allowed you absolutely no time for questions because I felt all those wonderful women actually deserve to speak to you please inspiring presentations thank you very very much indeed please come and ask your questions at the tea break it's really important that the conversations keep going you can't borrow the baby though