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News that top firms are to recruit students from less traditional universities has not been welcomed by all Corporate lawyers are up in arms about a shift in the profession’s graduate recruitment strategy that could see them forced to mix with “riffraff”. “I did not study at Oxford and the LSE to end up working with people who graduated from Leicester or Queen Mary,” wrote one person on legalweek.com in response to the news last week that magic circle outfit Freshfields is extending the number of universities from which it recruits. Others suggested that students from the less traditional universities were “dirty” and “substandard”, and that recruiting them was a pointless concession to political correctness. Freshfields’ announcement – which sees the solicitors to the Bank of England up the amount of institutions it targets to 28, including ex-poly Essex University – follows rival firm Allen & Overy’s (A&O) recent doubling of the number of universities it recruits to 40. The institutions include the University of East London (ranked 68th in The Times list of top law schools), City (ranked 57th in The Times list) and Greenwich (ranked 51st). A&O graduate recruitment manager Caroline Lindner says the idea that the profession is only interested in one type of person is “outdated”. She adds: “Our clients come from a range of backgrounds so it makes sense for our business to reflect that.” To facilitate this change in strategy the firm has said that it is prepared to be “flexible” with its traditional minimum A-level entry requirement of AAB, pledging to consider all applications, even if they fall short of that standard. However, the expectation is that those with lower A-levels grades will need to make up for it with strong degree performances. Another firm to have cast its net wider is Pinsent Masons, taking the total of major law firms to have broadened their recruitment pools since September to seven. During the last recruitment round Pinsents began targeting graduates from Napier (67th) and Aston (not ranked). The firm’s graduate recruitment manager, Edward Walker, puts the trend down to the impending tuition fee hike, which he thinks will see students increasingly select universities close to home so they can save money by living with their parents. “It’s not going to be a simple case of the best students going to the best universities anymore,” he says, adding that this will lower the incentive for graduate recruitment teams to travel far and wide to bring in the best new talent. Walker continues: “It’s going to make greater sense to focus more on the universities closer to the firm.” All this represents quite a change in mindset for the leading law firms, where Oxbridge graduates make up 38% of trainees , with just 12% having studied at universities outside the top 20. It’s a phenomenon partly explained by recent research from Dr Louise Ashley of Cass’s Centre for Professional Service Firms, which found law firms turned down candidates who looked or sounded working-class in order to preserve their upmarket brand. One City solicitor told Ashley: “There was one guy who came to interviews who was a real Essex barrow boy, and he had a very good CV, he was a clever chap, but we just felt that there’s no way we could employ him. I just thought, putting him in front of a client – you just couldn’t do it.” But there’s a growing sense that the legal profession – which is notorious for lagging other walks of life in reflecting the public mood – is casting aside some of these prejudices. This is illustrated by initiatives such as Addleshaw Goddard’s monitoring of its graduates’ socio-economic backgrounds, and the Bar Council’s new career website, become-a-barrister.com , set up to get the message across that students of “all backgrounds and ethnicities” can become barristers (although in doing so it glosses over some alarming statistics about how few trainee jobs there are at the bar). Certainly there are many lawyers in favour of broadening access, particularly among the older generation who joined the profession in an era when entry requirements were far less stringent. A senior partner at a large law firm told me recently that he thought recruitment based purely on academic merit had gone too far, advocating instead a return to the old system of hiring “five brainboxes, five wild cards, five solid all-rounders who were good at sport (for the firm’s cricket and rugby teams) and five stunningly beautiful women”. He added that one of the main reasons his firm stuck to the top universities was the students themselves: “They’re the biggest snobs of all. If we recruit too widely they won’t come to us.” Somewhere between these extremes may lay a happy medium. Alex Aldridge is a freelance journalist who writes about law and education Law Barristers Solicitors Students Higher education Alex Aldridge guardian.co.uk