• Rosina Harris: Paving the Way for Female Partners in British Law Firms

    With every great development in history, there comes a pioneer who enabled such progress to be made. Statistics from the Solicitors Regulation Authority suggest that in the UK currently, 33% [...]

  • Rosalind Wright remembers Dame Juliet Wheldon

    Rosalind Wright CB QC, second woman director of the Serious Fraud Office 1997-2003, remembers Dame Juliet Wheldon (1950-2014) DCB QC, who was Treasury Solicitor and Head of the Government Legal [...]

  • Dorothy Livingston

    An exclusive interview with Dorothy Livingston, the original inspiration behind the First 100 Years project. She was the first female partner of what was then Herbert Smith. She was [...]

  • Nemone Lethbridge: an inspirational story of a woman in law

    Nemone Lethbridge was born in 1932. She read law at Somerville College Oxford and was called to the Bar at Gray’s Inn in 1956. After mixed pupillages, she focused on [...]

  • Being different can be an advantage

    Jamila Hassan is a barrister at Goldsmith Chambers, specialising in immigration and human rights law. Born in Somalia and raised in Kenya and Sweden before completing her education in the [...]

  • A young woman who inspires me

    Claudine Adeyemi has been busy not only with her career as a real estate litigation lawyer since qualifying three years ago. She has also been actively making a difference in [...]

  • The Life of Charlotte Ray

    Charlotte Ray (1850 – 1911) was the first African American female lawyer in the United States. She became the first female admitted to the District of Columbia Bar, and the [...]

  • Women in French Legal History

    Three women changed the course of history in France at the end of the 19th century. Their names are not well-known even though they contributed to women's access to the [...]

  • Edith Annie Jones Berthen

    One of the first 10 women solicitors in England and Wales, Edith Berthen was also the first woman to qualify in Liverpool and later formed the first all women partnership [...]

  • Mary Elizabeth Pickup

    Four women, Carrie Morrison, Maud Crofts, Mary Elaine Sykes and Mary Elizabeth Pickup, passed the Law Society’s finals examinations in December 1922. Later that month Carrie Morrison became the first [...]

  • Elsie Florence Turner: First Woman to be Clerk to a Judge

    My maternal grandparents, Elsie Waugh and Stanley Turner, married in 1932, and their first child, a boy, was born in 1940. They were living in Willesden when in May of [...]

  • Baroness Deech: “Law is just the best discipline a woman can take up”

    Written by Baroness Deech QC(Hon) I studied law at a time when it was not at all fashionable for women to choose this - there were 8 women amongst 150 [...]

  • Ada Yeates & Sisters, Legal Stationers, Dublin

    The story of Ada Yeates and Sisters, legal stationers, scriveners and typists, who were the successors to a "law and commercial stamp retailer" business operated by Catherine Carroll since 1851. [...]

  • Agnes Twiston Hughes

    A woman of fierce determination, Agnes Twiston Hughes qualified as a solicitor in 1923 and thus became the first Welsh woman to qualify as a solicitor of the Supreme Court [...]

  • Mary Elaine Sykes, “The Wise Little Owl”

    Born in 1896 Mary Elaine Sykes was one of the first four women to pass the Law Society’s Final Examinations in 1922. She was the middle child of Huddersfield solicitor [...]