Slaughter and May doubles number of volunteers Wednesday, 3rd February 2010

Slaughter and May is the second most longstanding partner in Lawyers in Schools, having joined in 2004. For the past two years they have been working with Central Foundation Boys’ School in Islington, a partnership which has been so successful that over the last year Slaughter and May have more than doubled their numbers of volunteers (from 26 to 58) and have tripled the number of classes they work with.  The firm has also brought in lawyers from the legal department of a client (Standard Chartered Bank) to work on the project in collaboration with them.

We caught up with Jacquelyn Collins, Community Affairs Manager at Slaughter and May, to find out why she thought the scheme was going so well, and to see if she had any recruitment tips for other firms who also want to increase volunteer numbers.  This is what she had to say:

"Our pool of volunteers has grown a lot this year, mainly because we have both recruited new volunteers and retained a high proportion of our Lawyers in Schools volunteers from previous years.  The high number of 'repeat volunteers' demonstrates that our employees really enjoy taking part in these sessions.  And this was a great project to run in conjunction with client volunteers - we could be confident that participants would be well prepared and would be likely to enjoy the scheme.

There are three reasons why this scheme works well for us.  Firstly, the commitment required from volunteers is very clear, with sessions scheduled in advance and everybody able to see exactly how long they'll be away from the office.  This helps trainees to manage the expectations of their supervisors and makes it easier for busy associates to fit the sessions into their schedules.  Secondly, the volunteers receive excellent training from the Citizenship Foundation, helping to ensure that they are prepared for the challenges of working with secondary school students.  Finally, the modules are genuinely interesting to both the volunteers and the students.  This helps to ensure that everybody enjoys the sessions.

When we advertised the scheme we promoted both the scale of the commitment and the quality of the training.  In particular, we profiled the scheme as a good introduction to secondary school volunteering and this seems to have worked well - we've attracted trainees and associates who hadn't volunteered in any capacity before.  Of course, we now intend to involve them in other projects in the years to come!"