Lewis Silkin - True Picture

Firm profile

We work with leading businesses to protect and enhance their most important assets – their ideas, their brand and their future. We call this: Ideas. People. Possibilities.

With offices in London, Oxford, Manchester, Leeds, Cardiff, Belfast, Dublin and Hong Kong, and with strategic alliances across the globe, our clients range from large multinational corporations and FTSE 100 companies, to household name startups and entrepreneurs. We are recognised by clients and industry alike as being distinct for our unique culture, market-leading practice areas, sector-focused approach and for providing solutions to complex, multijurisdictional business challenges, with a pragmatic and human touch. We have two things at our core: people – both ours and our clients’– and a focus on creative, tech and innovative businesses.

Our culture is encapsulated by an ethos of bravery and kindness, guided by our values of integrity, clarity, unity and excellence (our ‘I-CUE’). We aim to provide a supportive environment for our people, clients and wider community and embrace diversity and inclusion, ensuring people are able to bring their full selves to work. 

In 2023 we were ranked 4th on Newsweek’s list of the UK’s Most Loved Workplaces.  

Main areas of work

Our major practice areas include: brands and intellectual property; digital, creative and commerce; corporate; data and privacy; dispute resolution; employment; immigration; investigations and regulatory; partnership; real estate; tax, reward and incentives; and trade mark and portfolio management.

Key sectors we work in include advertising and marketing; financial services; media and entertainment; professional services; retail, fashion and hospitality; sports business; and technology.  

Training opportunities

We offer hands on and supportive training contracts which consist of four six-month seats sitting within legal practice groups across the firm. There’s also the opportunity to participate in a client secondment.

Trainees will enjoy responsibility from day one and will gain a broad range of contentious and non-contentious experience. We aim to attract applicants from diverse backgrounds; we don’t mind if you’re fresh out of university or someone with previous experience in another industry.  

Other benefits

Benefits include individual and firm bonus scheme, life assurance, group income protection, health insurance, group pension plan, season ticket loan, cycle to work scheme, wellbeing subsidy, and subsidised gym membership. 

Open days and first-year opportunities

We run an Open Evening in our Cardiff, Belfast and London offices. These provide an insight into what it’s really like to work at Lewis Silkin and the opportunity to network with fee earners across the firm.  

Diversity, inclusion & wellbeing

Our firm is named after Lewis Silkin, whose story of social mobility continues to inspire us. His family were refugees from Lithuania and he was brought up in poverty, but qualified as a solicitor before becoming an MP and eventually sitting in the House of Lords. This history is at the core of our culture and our values and it drives our commitment to ensure that access to the legal profession is open and fair and that the profession itself is diverse and socially inclusive.

More broadly, we recognise that a more diverse and inclusive workplace allows for a plethora of ideas, thoughts and skillsets, a variety of points of view that can generate broader discussions and result in innovation, enhanced client service and a stronger and more cohesive team.

We are proud of the diverse range of people within Lewis Silkin and culture of bravery and kindness that allows individuals to be themselves at work, ensuring we provide the best possible service to our clients. All colleagues are encouraged to play a role in activities related to DEI or Responsible Business. A number of DEI groups are active across the firm - Gender, Age, Race and Ethnicity, Social Mobility, Lewis SilkOut (LGBTQ+), Disability, Wellbeing, and Interfaith – supported by our DEI Board and DEI & Wellbeing Lead. 

Recent progress on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI):
• We are 14th in the UK on the Social Mobility Index, which ranks UK employers according to changes they are making to how they find, recruit and advance talented employees from less privileged backgrounds
• We remain committed to widening access to the legal profession. During the year 2,000 students from 11 schools attended our careers outreach sessions in areas of low social mobility - and almost 40 students participated in our flagship Mentoring Scheme, a nine-month programme for students aged 16-18
• We have achieved equal representation of men and women at board level, and appointed our first female Joint Managing Partner in 2023
• Our Solicitor Apprenticeship scheme is successfully providing an alternative route to qualifying as a solicitor at Lewis Silkin, helping us to attract a more diverse range of candidates to the firm. We currently have five apprentices on our programme who will eventually qualify as a solicitor via this route.
• In 2023 we published our social mobility pay gap report for the first time 

Our commitments
• We are a signatory to The Law Society’s Diversity and Inclusion Charter, the leading diversity initiative of the legal profession, and a Gold Standard award recipient
• We are a legal partner to The Employers Network for Equality & Inclusion
• We are a signatory to The Law Society’s Women in Law Pledge
• Our gender goals are for 45% of partners to be women by 2027, to achieve gender balance in leadership and other fee-earning roles and to reduce our gender pay gap by 40% (from its 2019 levels) by 2027
• Our aim is for 16% of solicitors to come from ethnic minority backgrounds by June 2025, and 20% by June 2029
• We have signed up to the PRIME Commitment, a scheme offering quality work experience to students from low socioeconomic backgrounds
• We have been an accredited Living Wage Employer since 2012, and we extend this to outsourced services
• We are a founding member of the inter-law LGBT network group, LeGalBesT
• We are members of the Black Solicitors Network 

Awards related to DE&I
In 2024, at the Women, Influence & Power Awards, we were shortlisted for ‘ESG initiative of the year’ in relation to the sustainability and organisational culture aspects of our move to our new London office. One of our Associates, Sophie Jamieson, was also shortlisted for a ‘Rising Star’ award for her work to improve social mobility in the legal sector and we were shortlisted for ‘Social Mobility Firm of the Year’.

In 2023, Sophie Jameson, Associate, won the ‘Highly Commended and Gold Award’ in the Rising Star category at the UK Social Mobility Awards. Sophie founded our Cold Spot Outreach Programme, which delivers remote and in-person careers events to students in Year 10 and upwards in areas of low social mobility.

In 2022 we were a winner in Accenture’s Outside Counsel Diversity Awards, which ‘recognise and celebrate the tangible progress on diversity and inclusion (D&I) made by law firms and their efforts to increase equality and inclusion within the profession’.