AFTER two decades practising as an employment lawyer, Dentons partner Amanda Jones is preparing to quit her day job.

Not that she is about to leave the international law firm she joined last year as part of its takeover of Scottish outfit Maclay Murray and Spens.

Rather, Ms Jones is staying with the firm to take up the newly created role of women’s advancement director, a global position that will see her focus specifically on ensuring female lawyers progress into leadership positions at the firm.

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Although Ms Jones had played an active role in introducing agile working at Maclays, where she had been a board member for five years prior to it becoming part of Dentons, she said that as 150-office Dentons is so much bigger there is greater potential to effect real change.

It is for that reason that she felt the opportunity was worth giving up her practice for.

“If they had put football in there it really would be my dream job,” Ms Jones, who has also been a director at Hibernian Football Club since 2007, said.

“At Maclays we did very well at trying to introduce agile working but now, given the scale of Dentons, we can move that up with resources behind it.

“It’s important not just to look at the straight partner numbers but the channel and structure behind that.

“The big opportunity from my point of view is that I can look at this as a blank sheet of paper.

“The legal profession is changing and if law firms try to fit the next generation of lawyers onto the structure that currently exists it’s not going to work.

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“It’s about looking at how we work, where we work, how the work is measured and how it is given out to people.

“I’ll be seeing where we can do better to do better business, which is what it all comes down to.”

Dentons, like all law firms, still has some way to go before the proportion of women it hires at the junior end is reflected at partner level.

Indeed, in the UK almost 60 per cent of the firm’s trainee intake is female, while just over 25% of its partner population is.

Despite this, Ms Jones noted that the proportions – and the reasons for the discrepancy – vary from region to region, with Dentons’ Singapore practice having close to a 50-50 gender split at partner level.

Unsurprisingly, when she takes up the role on a full-time basis in October, Ms Jones will spend time getting to know how each of the firm’s regions operates to identify how big her task is and how best to tackle it.

“Different areas will have different priorities and I will spend a while getting to know who I need to know and identifying what the priorities are in each area,” she said.

“I’m really interested in learning about the different ways the different regions work and trying to take best practice from each of them.”

Ultimately, she expects the work to lead to a fundamental change in the way Dentons’ lawyers – male and female – approach their jobs.

“It’s about restructuring the way the legal profession works to make it more appealing for women and stop them leaving the profession in the numbers they are because if nothing else it’s just a waste of resources,” she said.

Ms Jones believes her progress will be watched closely by others in the profession, with most firms recognising the business case for diversity even if few have been able to achieve it.

“Dentons aims to be a disruptor in the legal profession and I definitely think that diversity and inclusion is at the core of how it operates its business,” she said.

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“If you look at global clients, this is the sort of issue that’s at the top of their agenda, not because it’s a nice thing to do but because it’s the best thing to do from a business perspective.”

With Ms Jones preparing to step down from her practice, she does not expect to return to fee earning in the future.

That said, as she is still at least 10 years away from thinking about retirement, Ms Jones hopes that her work at Dentons will be so successful that the role of women’s advancement director will become a redundant one in the not too distant future.

“In a way I want to do myself out of a job because I don’t want us to need this,” she said.