Women in the City Winner: Diana Good, Linklaters

by Elizabeth Harrin (London)

After 30 years of legal experience at Linklaters you’d expect Diana Good to know a thing or two about the industry. She has seen a great deal of change since she joined the firm as a trainee in 1979. She became a litigation partner in 1988 and specializes in running complex high profile cases with an international angle.

Diana has international experience herself. She ran the Linklaters’ Brussels office which gave her the opportunity to work in a diverse city. “I learned that it is a pleasure to live in a city where three languages [French, Flemish and English] are spoken with equal fluency,” she says, “and where so many different cultures and nationalities rub shoulders with one another. It’s a great city to live and work in. Three of my daughters were born there and we have very happy memories of our time there.”

Diana makes it sound like working in Belgium was easy, all waffles and chocolate sauce, but actually she has faced some significant challenges during her career. She was the first woman to be elected to the company’s Management Committee and later again broke the mould by being the first woman to sit on the International Board.

“It was a challenge but a pleasure,” she says. “I did it because I have always thought that if you are going to do a job you should really go for it and make sure that you are in a position to make a difference. The fact that you are a woman and a mother should only make you even better at management and should not stand in your way.”

Diana has also implemented policies that have made it easier for other women to work at Linklaters, by leading the promotion of diversity issues. Way back in 1997 when other firms were only beginning to think about managing the return to work for mothers, Diana was developing Linklaters’ flexible working policy, which applied to both staff and partners – the first of its kind in the cut-throat environment of the City of London at that time.

“I did it at a time when no other city firms were doing anything like this and when most of the Linklaters partners were far from ready to do it,” she explains. “The only way to go about it was to take time, be thorough and talk to people a lot.” Diana says that approaching the issue of flexible working from the point of view of the business case, rather than from the point of view of women’s rights, means even the most die-hard cynics have to accept that it makes commercial sense. “If people think about flexible working out of context they may find it hard to accept but if you think of a much valued colleague and then work out would you rather employ them 70% of the time than have them leave and therefore have them 0% of the time, it’s not hard to work out that it would be better to find an accommodation.”

Linklaters already had ad hoc arrangements in place but each employee had to plead his or her case and there was no transparency. The firm had never had any part-time partners so there was no practical implementation of flexible working at the top, and no role models. The aim of the scheme Diana implemented was to have a wholly transparent and uniform system, applicable to both men and women. “Our employees may not know whether or not they are going to get married and want to have children but with 50% of our lawyers being women we as employers could, and should, work out that a good number of them will confront this issue,” Diana says. “We want the best people to sustain a long term career with the firm so we needed to think ahead and show the staff that we had a plan which will help tide them over a difficult point in their careers.”

Diana spent 18 months talking to partners, associates and clients, male and female, in small groups and often one to one. She managed this around the demands of her full-time litigation job.

“After 18 months of consultation and analysis I presented the plan to the full partnership and we spent a whole afternoon in syndicate groups discussing the proposals,” she continues. “At the end we had unanimous support and the whole partnership stood and applauded. It was clear that they felt really proud to have reached what was at the time a highly innovative approach. Since then most other firms have followed suit although at first they were very vocal in their criticism.”

Diana was recently the Legal category winner in the Women in the City awards, and she is delighted to have received that recognition at a time when her career is changing direction. She is retiring from Linklaters and her city career, but she won’t be idle.

“I’m not really retiring at all,” Diana explains. “I want to do a variety of things and then find what it is that really engages me most so I am going to continue to be a part time judge, I’ve been asked to be a visiting professor at Rome University, I am going to be the Chair of a charity called the Mary Ward Settlement which is both an adult education centre and a legal centre, I am a trustee to the Access to Justice Foundation, and a member of the Advisory Council of Advocates for International Development.”

If that isn’t enough, she will be continuing her ties with Linklaters through the charity Camfed (the Campaign for the education of girls in Africa). “I will be going to Zambia in January,” she says, “and I hope Zimbabwe later next year, and I’m studying French at degree level part-time…so, as you can see, I will be busy!”