I. Stephanie Boyce
The Visionary
The future, and what is barely possible, reads round the next corner.
I. Stephanie Boyce is the 177th President of the Law Society of England and Wales, the first Black person and first person of colour appointed to the role in the institution's 200-year history.
“You're over there thinking about joining the queue, and whilst you're over there thinking about joining the queue, other people are in the queue. And they're ahead of you because you're not even in the queue. And then by the time you join the queue, you're at the back. So the whole point is be flexible, be adaptable.”
“Absolutely. So I began my journey, my life journey, if you like, in Ellsbury, Bucknamshire, where I still live after all these years. But when I was growing up in Ellsbury all those years ago, it was a small, sleepy market town with little ethnic diversity compared to today. It's growing.”
“You know, I made plenty of applications, but I had a recruitment agent tell me very early in my career that you'll never get into the city. You didn't train in the city, you didn't practice in the city, you've never worked in a city, you're never going to get into the city. I got rid of her because she didn't see my dream.”
“And the other thing, of course, was that at that time, Nobel said to me that there's a different route, you know, other than either there's a different route into law or you don't have to go into private practice. You can go in-house. In-house is the fastest growing area of the profession at the moment.”
Off The Agenda (2022, recorded at the Law Society)
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