Legal Neurodiversity Network

Since the LNN was founded nearly two years ago, our aim has been to drive thought leadership on neuro-inclusive good practice within the #legalservices industry. We have spoken on panels, released articles, hosted multiple events, and participated in a nationwide governmental review. However, we have not produced our own publication on #neuroinclusion … until now! Without further ado, we are delighted to present our first official publication, the Legal Neurodiversity Network's 'Recommendations for optimising retention and career progression for neurodivergent individuals in the legal profession'. The aim of this publication is to provide #legal #employers with a digestible guide to the types of #adjustments they should be implementing within their organisations to maximise the potential of their #neurodivergent employees – and to promote a working environment where everyone feels valued, seen and understood. Our recommendations have been grouped into three keys themes – People, Processes and Place – each of which represent a fundamental part of neuro-inclusive good practice within the #workplace. The publication has taken us nearly a year to complete - starting with our roundtable event hosted at Linklaters in 2023 where we gathered opinions from neurodivergent stakeholders and allies from across the legal industry, followed by months of further discussions between committee members and LNN affiliates, and, finally, painstaking drafting by the LNN committee, with input from our wonderful friends at The Law Society, most notably Chris Seel. We are incredibly proud of what we have accomplished and extremely grateful for all of the hard work put in by everyone who contributed to the report’s completion. We hope you will all take the time to look at our report and consider how it applies to you and your organisation. If you are a legal employee, consider sharing it with any relevant committees or support groups. If you are a manager, consider showing it to HR or to your higher-ups. And, if you are a senior manager or part of the leadership team, please take the time to read and reflect on the contents, and consider how you can reasonably, and feasibly, implement some (if not all!) of our recommendations. We will be hosting a clinic-style event next month at Herbert Smith Freehills, where we will be discussing the report in more detail and sharing practical tips on how to implement our recommendations. We hope that by bringing employers together to discuss their progress, everyone will feel empowered to continue on their individual paths towards neuro-inclusion. Ultimately, we hope that by building inter-organisational support and consensus, our recommendations will quickly become accepted practice within the legal industry. #neurodiversity #neurodiversityinlaw #LNN

Season's greetings from everyone at the Legal Neurodiversity Network to all our wonderful followers and friends! Whatever your plans for the festive season, we hope these leave you feeling refreshed and renewed. We're so grateful for all your engagement and support during 2024, a year in which we: ♾️ Were featured as a case study in the Buckland Review of Autism Employment ♾️ Released our first publication, a set of recommendations for retaining and promoting neurodivergent talent in legal services organisations ♾️ Continued to hold events to raise awareness and connect our community, including our first get-togethers outside London (in Birmingham and Leeds) ♾️ Participated in and fundraised for the largest ever iteration of the London Legal Walk ♾️ Launched a working group of HR and DEI professionals to share good #neuroinclusion practices across our sector ♾️ Saw our footprint expand to over 4,000 followers on LinkedIn, over 350 active members of our mailing list, and a foothold in more than 100 legal services organisations ♾️ Celebrated as member companies implemented new strategies and programmes that will facilitate improved access for neurodivergent job candidates, enhance the employment experience for neurodivergent colleagues, and strengthen support for parents/carers of neurodivergent dependents ♾️ Cheered on as many of YOU achieved qualifications, promotions, new jobs, won awards, organised initiatives, bravely shared your lived experience of neurodivergence, and simply carried on being yourselves in a world/industry that still doesn't optimally support brains that work differently; you inspire us and give us our purpose We're excited for what 2025 will bring and to share our programme of planned activities - and to see or meet for the first time as many of you as possible during the course of the year. With lots of love from your LNN co-chairs and committee members: Concetta Dalziel Rachel Boyle Beth Try Richard Fisk Zamaris Saxon Freya Cumpsty Fiona Fleming Martin Whitehorn JJ Thompson Flora Caroline Sitwell Aimee Revell ACILEx Penny Terndrup and James Smither

"Have you always known you're autistic / have ADHD?" This is an interesting question, to which the simple answer is "no". I've only lived inside my own head, and to all intents and purposes assumed as such that everyone experiences the world in roughly the same way. Going through my recent #diagnosis as #AuDHD (autistic with ADHD) was life-changing in multiple ways, not least among which was seeing my entire existence to date through the perspective of the attributes I've always displayed that I now know and understand constitute a #neurodivergent profile. While it's clearly futile speculating "should I have known sooner?" or "why didn't others pick up on this?" - especially given how much less knowledge and understanding of #neurodiversity was prevalent in my youth - it has been helpful, and to a certain extent healing, for me to start to reframe some things I have always felt (or, worse, been told) were character flaws or performance shortcomings as instead more reflective of neurological wiring that is not intrinsically a deficit, especially in a world that (both when I was younger, and very much still) does not tend to cater for those in minorities of any persuasion. In that spirit, I thought I would share these attributes in case they're of interest or relevance in your world. Please note this is not me saying "you're autistic / have ADHD too" if you display any/some of these. It's likewise definitely *not* intended to buttress the damaging "everyone is a little bit autistic" trope (or the similarly harmful "it seems everyone is calling themselves ADHD these days"). There is a medical-level rigour to the diagnosis process that involves crossing a rigorous threshold across multiple attributes in multiple expert practitioners' views; indeed, while you may consider some of the presentations I describe as "mild" compared to stereotypes, I was surprised just how decisively I scored across most of these assessment criteria! To use colloquial parlance, I "smashed it"! My main messages: every neurodivergent person is different, and there is no greater or lesser value in these infinite varieties of presentation. The more we're aware of these manifestations - some of which undeniably present as challenges in everyday life - the more we can help people who need it navigate towards the diagnostic or support services from which they will benefit, as I have been fortunate to do, and the more mindfully and empathetically we may all behave towards each other in the inevitably, gloriously neurodiverse circles in which we live our lives! ====================================== Thanks for reading. I'd love to hear if any of these traits resonate and, as always, my DMs are open if there's anything you want to ask about or share in confidence. Thanks for reading!

Continuing our #IDPD shares with this post from our memberships co-lead James Smither - we love to see Freshfields joining the growing list of legal employers participating in the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower 💜 programme 🌻🌻🌻

Sharing this excellent #IDPD spotlight on our brilliant LNN friend Duncan P. at Eversheds Sutherland

Today is #internationaldayofdisabledpeople #IDDP #IDPWD2024 The UN’s 2024 Theme is “Amplifying the leadership of persons with disabilities” which “is epitomised by the global disability rights movement’s slogan #nothingaboutuswithoutus” We are celebrating the work of our Disability Working Group (DWG) comprised of barrister and staff who are disabled and/or have expertise in disability inclusion. Over the last four years, it  has led change to embed disability rights in chambers work practices, revamping our Reasonable Adjustments policy and practices, and advancing accessibility for pupils, barristers, staff and clients. Over the coming weeks we will share more on the work of the DWG and its members as we mark #ukdisabilityhistorymonth. Today, we feature DWG’s Chair, Mark Henderson. He also chairs the Bar Council Disability Panel. The video has just been published of The Bar Council of England and Wales’s annual disability inclusion event, which Mark chaired. It focussed on best practice in reasonable adjustments for neurodivergent pupils and barristers. Watch it here: https://lnkd.in/eVG9FkN6 #IDPWD #IDDP2024 #DisabilityInclusion #Disability #DisabilityEmployment #Adjustments #DiversityAndInclusion

Today we are marking International Day Of Persons With Disabilities. This year's theme is "Amplifying the leadership of persons with disabilities for an inclusive and sustainable future."    This theme highlights an incredibly important part of our mission statement – which is to #empower #neurodivergent #professionals to achieve positions of #leadership and #responsibility in our sector. As more and more neurodivergent individuals achieve senior positions and get the opportunity to participate in decision-making processes, this will have an enriching effect on organisation- and ultimately industry-wide culture, including around #inclusivity and #sustainability.   Simultaneously, we recognise that there are already many neurodivergent leaders who are either reticent about disclosing their neurodivergence, or who simply don't feel the need. We completely understand and respect this mentality; however, hopefully, as #neurodiversity #awareness continues to increase, legal professionals at every level will feel completely comfortable to share this aspect of their identity at work, seeing it as a genuine value-add rather than something to be kept private and providing those at earlier stages of their career with an ever more populated landscape of role-models to emulate.   We will end by saying that we understand that #disability is a vast spectrum encompassing both physical and non-physical, visible and less-visible, conditions – and that people who qualify under the ‘legal’ definition of this category can and do choose different ways of incorporating it into their identities. We sincerely wish to add our voice to the #disabled #community in a way that does not divert attention from other forms of disability. To quote Reena Parmar, Chair of the The Law Society Disabled Solicitors Network and longstanding friend of the LNN: "Disabled people, and neurodivergent individuals within that wider community, share a common interest in championing workplaces where the physical environment, technology systems, processes and attitudes all support inclusivity for people with any type of disability, visible or invisible, as well as those with more than one. This transcends labels, as it goes towards improving our collective human experience in the workplace. This IDPD and every day, I applaud and thank those leaders in our legal community advocating for immediate and enduring change in this area." #InternationalDayofPersonsWithDisabilities #IDPD #LNN

It is currently Disability History Month (14th Nov - 20th Dec). This year's theme is 'Disability Livelihood and Employment', a topic close to our hearts at the LNN. The employment rate for disabled people in the UK currently sits at slightly over 50% - 30 points lower than the average for people who are not disabled. Neurodivergent people - who are commonly (but not exclusively) regarded as falling under the disability umbrella - face similar employability barriers, with certain neuro-types experiencing drastically low employment rates. Most notably, autistic people in the UK have a 29% chance of finding employment. We hope that by continuing to raise neurodiversity awareness and promote the wonderful qualities possessed by neurodivergent people, employment opportunities for people with disabilities will continue to improve. We would like to share the The Law Society's new 'Guide to disability terminology and language', which was published to mark this event. We would also like to highlight our committee member Martin Whitehorn's widely-read recent article written for the Law Society Gazette considering whether physical disabilities and neurodiversity should be treated the same (a very important question that we continue to grapple with here at the LNN!). Finally, given this year's theme, we wish to highlight again the Buckland Review of Autism Employment, a publication which aims to address the under employment of autistic people in the UK, and which we contributed to as an organisation. Links to all publications can be found in the comments below. 🙏 #DisabilityHistoryMonth #UKDisabilityHistoryMonth #UKDHM #Neurodiversity #NeurodiversityInclusion #DisabilityLivelihood #DisabilityEmployment

We are delighted to announce our new Communications and Social Media Co-Lead, Aimee Revell ACILEx. Aimee is a Trainee Legal Executive at Freeths and a passionate neurodiversity inclusion advocate, with lived experience of autism and ADHD. Aimee will be joining our existing communications committee member, Flora Caroline Sitwell, in creating promotional content for our social media pages - with a focus on launching our brand new Instagram page (watch this space for more details! 👀 ) Welcome to the LNN Committee Aimee! 😊 #LNN #neurodiversityinclusion #law #LegalNeurodiversityNetwork

Check out our amazing Committee member Martin Whitehorn in this profile piece from the The Law Society 😍 We couldn't be prouder of, or more grateful for, his tireless and multi-faceted contributions to neuro-inclusion in our sector!