When Adrienne D’Arcy joined law firm Jacksons, Monk & Rowe in 1982, she was the only female solicitor.
“I didn’t think of myself as a trailblazer at the time and it probably had not really dawned on me until now that I was,” says Adrienne.
“It certainly didn’t faze me being the only female solicitor. Looking back now I suppose I was a bit of a novelty as the only other women in the office were secretaries and support staff and I soon realised that in a male-dominated industry, I would have to look and act the part in order to be taken seriously and carve out a successful career in law.”
Adrienne befriended the secretaries, who were “very supportive”, and worked hard in a profession that had her “hooked” from her time at Chester Law College, where she also met her husband.
As a trainee solicitor (or articled clerk as they were then known), she won the William Hutton Prize for the Law Society Final Examination with a cash award of £1,500.
Adrienne wins William Hutton Prize. Evening Gazette, Friday, Oct. 14, 1983
“At the time, I was earning about £2,200 a year so £1,500 was a lot of money and it bought me my first car, a second-hand silver Volkswagen Polo,” says Adrienne.
“I have the happiest memories of working at Jacksons. Trainees were thrown in at the deep end. A lot of my work involved factory accidents and taking statements from witnesses all over the North East. It was interesting for them to have a woman come out to the factories. They would try to chat me up or embarrass me whilst I was trying my best to take a statement by opening their locker doors displaying their topless page three pin-up girls. But I felt like I could take on anything.”
Offices in the 1980s and early 1990s were very different to modern workspaces and Adrienne remembers the huge antique partners’ desks with piles of paperwork in filing trays, filing cabinets, a phone, typewriter and fountain pens. There were no computers, mobile phones or Dictaphones.
At the age of 26 and having completed her two-year training and eight months as a qualified solicitor, she was promoted to partner.
“One of the partners, Andrew Tate, was retiring as I qualified so I took over a lot of his caseload with key clients such as Tees & Hartlepool Port Authority. Maybe they thought it would look better if I was a partner,” she suggests.
“It was certainly unusual to be made a partner that quickly, but I was very lucky as Jacksons never held me back.”
Married in 1986, Adrienne moved to Leeds to work for a large commercial litigation firm but didn’t stay long as she and her husband made the leap to move to Hong Kong in 1988, where they both worked for the largest law firm in South-East Asia. Although she had a fantastic office overlooking Hong Kong Harbour, salaries were higher than in the UK and the tax rate lower, the downside was that their contracts included working on Saturday mornings.
Their two daughters were born in Hong Kong and Adrienne took six weeks’ maternity leave (the standard allowance in Hong Kong at the time) and two weeks’ holiday before returning to work full-time.
“It really was not that bad! I often think it must be harder for people returning to work when they’ve had a longer maternity leave,” she says.
“The key to being a successful working mum is to have support which I did. I was very lucky as we could afford a full-time nanny.”
“I think I’ve always been a very supportive boss and I know full well just what it’s like trying to juggle the demands of working full time and being a mum, desperately trying to prove to your employer that you are a competent, committed solicitor while trying to run a household and get the children out of the house and ready for school. Some days it goes horribly wrong and there’s nothing you can do about it. I have to admit that I’m quite jealous of women working now because when I started out you couldn’t work part-time or from home and if you were a partner and wanted to go part-time after having children, that wasn’t an option.”
Jacksons is very forward-thinking and in the past couple of years, they have introduced termtime and flexible contracts, which are popular with both male and female applicants.
“People’s attitudes have changed too,” adds Adrienne.
“At the time many people were quite shocked (even disgusted!) when I said I was going to continue working after having children. People said to me you can’t work full-time and raise a family. That probably made me more determined to show them they were wrong and I could do both and do it well.”
They returned to work in Leeds in 1994 and Adrienne moved to a law firm in Harrogate in 1996 where she was made a partner in 2000 and remains to this day.
Jacksons, which has offices in Stockton and Newcastle, has seen a wide variety of momentous events over its 150-year history and a pertinent one to International Women’s Day is the change in the men: women ratio since Adrienne’s day. Now, Jacksons has a team which is 75% female and 25% male. In 1982, Adrienne was the only female solicitor; now Jacksons has 23, as well as four female partners led by Head of Legal, Erica Turner and Head of Operations, Amie Callan.
