Each month, we hear the stories from the people behind the law degrees at the 145-year-old, South Yorkshire-based law firm Banner Jones. Most recently, we spoke to director, shareholder and Head of Employment Law, Katie Ash …
Hi Katie. Can you start by telling us how you got into law?
Bizarrely, I’d always wanted to be a lawyer. I think it must have come from watching a bit of Perry Mason and LA Law growing up because I didn’t know anyone in the law – I had no idea.
I grew up on the Wybourn in Sheffield. I went to Wybourn Primary School and then Waltheof on the Manor. My dad was a steelworker and my mum worked for the Sheffield Co-Op, in the accounts department, so it wasn’t necessarily a traditional route into law.
I had a lovely childhood, very ordinary, but no one went to university, and we certainly didn’t aspire to be in a profession. We were a working class family, and I was lucky enough that my mum was around for most of my childhood. It was only when I was maybe nine or ten that she got a job, and even then it was 9.30am until 2.30pm, so she was still around. Dad was out for 12 to 14 hour days, bringing home the money, working in a dirty job.
Even with this background, I still remember a picture of me that I’d drawn as a child, where I was holding a briefcase. I didn’t want to be an Olympic swimmer, I wanted to be a lawyer, so I went off to do A Levels and did Law as one of them. I really enjoyed it, so I went and did a law degree, and thankfully, I still really enjoyed it, which is lucky because I didn’t have a backup plan.
Where did you study?
I went to Sheffield Hallam and became the first of my family to go to university. I stayed local because by that point I’d already met my now-husband, so I had a reason to stay. It was probably financially motivated as well because I didn’t have to move out of home.
When I finished university, I fell onto the bandwagon of ‘if I want to be a solicitor I’ve got to go and do the LPC’, so I went off and did that in York for a year and luckily got a job in law.
Did your background impact your experience of studying law at university?
Maybe I’ve just got a thick skin because I don’t ever remember feeling like that on the LPC. Two of my best friends now, one came from a boarding school background, and my other best friend, her dad was a policeman, so maybe I never felt the class divide because I’d already made those connections.
“I work in an environment where we support our colleagues to reach their full potential through training and mentoring.”
I think the only difference I noticed was that for some people, there’s perhaps no fear of failure, whereas I think I still fear failure. There’s no safety net for me and I still get a bit of imposter syndrome even in my work now.
It was probably more evident when I was applying for training contracts with the bigger law firms. The way it worked, and probably still does, was you apply two years in advance to try and get some funding towards doing a post-grad and I was not successful at all in getting anything from that.
They were generally large international law firms. To be fair, that wasn’t where I was going to end up. I was never going to end up in a corporate law firm because that’s not who I am. And I’m not their person because I don’t have the right university on my CV. My personality won’t come through on a piece of paper that says I’m from Sheffield Hallam, so there was a lot of that, and there probably still are a lot of employers looking for the red bricks.
So where did you end up in your first job?
I went to a personal injury firm. I didn’t like personal injury, but they did a lot of work for the National Union of Miners, so a lot of employment work. I loved employment law, and I was really lucky to get a training contract with them.
What did you enjoy about the work?
I loved the nature of the work and I get quite passionate about doing a good job for individuals as well as businesses. Because I was working for a big client in the NUM and fighting cases for wronged individuals or trade unions, it was big stuff.
It was really exciting. Going down to London on big cases and meeting barristers, I loved all of that and never looked back really.
“I still remember a picture of me that I’d drawn as a child, where I was holding a briefcase. I didn’t want to be an Olympic swimmer, I wanted to be a lawyer.”
Law is traditionally seen as a male-dominated industry. Do you feel that has ever held you back?
It is at the top. What you’ll find with law firms, and you’ll see this if you just walk around this floor, is that women are everywhere. They are probably more than 50 percent of the workforce.
Often it’s male-dominated in senior leadership roles, but not here. In Banner Jones’ senior leadership there are lots of women, including myself, and we’re also doing much better at shareholder level. I was the first woman to come in to the shareholding in a long time, but in a shareholding of eight, three are now women, so we are bucking the trend a little bit.
The discrepancy is something that I know is there, but during my career I’ve always been fortunate enough to work with some pretty strong women. Maybe they enabled me to think this is normal and that I can achieve what I want to.
While they may not always have been overtly advocating women, what I did see was that they were women in senior roles. I hope I choose to advocate for women. Just because you had it hard, doesn’t mean you have to make it hard for the next crop.
Thankfully, I work in an environment where we support our colleagues to reach their full potential through training and mentoring.
Are there any big career-defining moments that you look back on fondly?
It’s hard to talk about lots of things because of client confidentiality but there was a period where I was dealing with two quite high-profile things locally, and for two different clients. It was incredibly stressful because I would find out more from the local radio about what was going on than what the clients could tell me, or than they knew.
I’d be driving in to work and the trade union would be chatting to Toby Foster on BBC Radio Sheffield about what was going on. I’d be like, this is going to be my day now. I suppose that was exciting as well.
During periods like that, the work sometimes be overwhelming?
It can be stressful because it’s often people’s lives we’re dealing with, and I really feel that. With the best will in the world, people don’t want to have to pay me to do a job, especially if they’re an individual or a small business, because it comes at a financial cost and that’s something that I appreciate. To get great feedback from individual clients is rewarding. The big career-defining cases are great, but I get a real kick from the general day-to-day of helping individual and employer clients. I’ve got a great relationship with some of the HR managers for my business clients. I lost my sister recently, and have had messages from some of them asking if I’m ok, because they value me and our relationship.
I’m really sorry to hear about your sister. Does a loss like that make you reevaluate things when it comes to work life balance?
My sister and I were estranged for a few years, but we were able to reconcile before she died, which made her passing even harder. I have a really lovely work family who have been super supportive over the last few weeks. I’ve lost a few people over the years, and while I’m focused and driven to succeed, at the back of my mind I’m always aware that life is short and it is for enjoying. My husband, daughter and I squeeze every ounce of fun out of every single day.
