Meet the law firm boss who is out to challenge the status quo

A driver of this change is the increasing number of progressive law firms and collectives offering flexible approaches.

One of those progressive firms is ALT Legal in Wetherby, which is headed by Anna Ashford.

“Our structure is very different,” Ms Ashford says. “We don’t have partners. We don’t have hourly billings targets. Everybody is equally valued. I want to listen to what our trainee thinks about something because his experience is different to mine.”

The commercial law firm was founded by Richard Turner and Rob Ashall and employs ten people. The business started as ALT Legal but then became Alpaca as it added other services.

It has now re-established the ALT Legal name to help both those inside the business and outside it get a clearer understanding of what the firm offers.

Ms Ashford joined ALT Legal four years ago as a commercial solicitor. She then took on a management role.

“With the launch of ALT Legal, I guess I was the natural choice to lead it because that’s what I’m enjoying doing,” she said.

The commercial lawyer is the ideal person to head up a progressive approach in the legal sector. Originally from Kent, Ms Ashford landed in Yorkshire when she came to study here.

“I was very happy here,” she says. “I’ve been here ever since I was 18.”

She added: “I went to law school in York at the College of Law and then I started my training contract at DLA Piper. It’s where I spent my whole career. I trained and qualified at DLA and worked there for about 14 years.”

Ms Ashford says her first decade there was “brilliant”. She added: “It was a great place to work. It’s one of the top law firms in the world. All of your experience, client work, team events and training really supports that.”

However, she felt things changed in 2011 after her daughter was born. Ms Ashford said: “The support disappeared pretty much overnight at that point.”

The lawyer was made to feel that she had made a choice of starting a family at the expense of a career.

She said: “It doesn’t matter if you log back on at 7pm in the evening, we need you here in the office. It’s bums on seats. If you’re not here and we can’t see you we forget about you. That was really frustrating and I was pretty miserable deciding what to do.”

It was difficult to take as aside from a secondment at RBS, it was the only place she had ever worked.

Ms Ashford said: “I’d worked really hard and I was on the partnership process when I got pregnant and the pregnancy was planned. That was a choice but I wasn’t aware that the two should be mutually exclusive.”

She was then diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2014 and had to take 18 months off work. Although Ms Ashford found the law firm really supportive of her at this point, she felt the world had moved on after the fallout from the credit crunch.

“All my clients had almost ceased to exist,” Ms Ashford said. “Obviously the RBS and Barclays types still existed but I worked in insolvency and banks were no longer taking enforcement action, which is what I did.”

She added: “I look back on it and see it as a positive. It gave me the push I needed to leave DLA. I came back for about six weeks and thought this isn’t for me anymore. Life is too short.”

Instead after a short break she went on to work under the Serenwood banner before Ms Ashford landed at ALT Legal.

DLA Piper says as a firm it has many people working in an “agile, flexible way”.

In 2019, it launched its international agile working policy, WorkSmart, and enhanced its caring, maternity, paternity and shared parental leave policies.

The firm added it was “absolutely committed to building a truly inclusive workplace” and has introduced diversity targets and development programmes.

The profession is beginning to change with quite a few challenger businesses cropping up in recent years.

Ms Ashford said: “There is a good number of challengers coming into the market and disrupting it, showing that it can be done differently for clients, lawyers and everybody that works there.”

ALT Legal currently has ten staff but is looking to double this headcount over the next 18 months. However, the aim is not to replicate the big firms.

“We have no plans to have 100 or 150 lawyers sat in an office churning out contracts,” Ms Ashford says. “That’s not what we want to do.”

Conversations with prospective new recruits during the interview process show that many traditional legal firms have still not changed their ways when it comes to how they allow employees to work, according to Ms Ashford.

The commercial lawyer had a unique perspective of the financial crash of 2008. Ms Ashford spent a year on secondment at RBS during this time.

“I was sat in the global restructuring group, which was the team responsible for the customers of the bank who were suffering, were in financial distress, which obviously was massively heightened during the credit crunch,” she said.

The biggest challenge though of Ms Ashford’s career has been trying to breakthrough as a female juggling a family. She added: “Myself and various other people, who are challenging this and not putting up with it anymore, show that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing.”

Ms Ashford is also looking to bring like-minded, progressive law firms together.

She said: “The plan is to get the best progressive legal minds around the table to start sharing these ideas. Ian McCann is doing great things at Legal Studio. Jodie Hill in Leeds with Thrive Law is doing brilliant things. It’s wanting to get those people who are progressive and challenging the status quo together.”

Her ultimate aim is to make sure that other people have fruitful and enjoyable careers. She said: “I want to have fun, I want to enjoy it and I want to make that possible for everybody else.”

Curriculum vitae

Title: Head of ALT Legal

Date of birth: February 9, 1979

Lives: Hampsthwaite, outside Harrogate, with my husband, ten-year-old daughter, three chickens and two dwarf hamsters

Favourite holiday destination: Mallorca, a place we’ve been going to for many years and are still discovering new places to visit and eat

Last book read: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, which was chosen by my book club

Favourite film: Dirty Dancing

Car driven: VW Golf

Most proud of: My daughter Isabel and the fabulous person she is growing into and having the confidence to find the balance between motherhood and a legal career.

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James Mitchinson