Affinity and Beyond

Law firms learned to recognise the old boys’ network. They are less eager to recognise the networks of advantage that replaced it.

This is not a piece about women in power. It is a piece about power — and what happens when law firms become selective about the forms of patronage they are willing to recognise.

A good few years ago, a senior associate I had worked with for years looked at me and said:

“How does it feel to be male and heading towards middle age? You haven’t timed this very well, have you?”

I did not really understand what she meant.

This was in the 2010s. I was younger and still labouring under the touching delusion that professional life was governed mainly by work, judgment, output and the quality of one’s advice.

She explained herself. The profession was changing. Diversity was becoming central. The old assumptions were being rewritten. People like me, she suggested, were going to find the next phase rather harder than the last.

At the time, it sounded melodramatic. The broader correction was overdue, certainly. But her forecast still sounded strange.

The old boys’ network was real. It did not require minutes, a constitution or a budget code. It operated through lunch, school, sport, accent, confidence, drinking, shared references, private jokes, inherited ease and the quiet ability of certain men to recognise themselves in younger versions of themselves.

It was not always announced as preference. That is not how preference usually works. It was simply absorbed into the atmosphere. Some people found doors opening. Some people found themselves invited. Some people were quietly sponsored, protected, interpreted generously and introduced to the right people at the right time.

Others were not.

The old boys’ network deserved to be dismantled. I am not arguing otherwise.

This is not nostalgia. The old order was not fair, charming or harmless. It was often lazy, clubby, self-satisfied and damaging. I do not want it back.

The question is not whether the old patronage should have survived. It should not.

The question is whether a profession that learned to condemn patronage in one form is willing to recognise it in another.

Dismantling one patronage network does not mean that patronage has ended. It may only mean the badges, lanyards and admission codes have changed.

This is the part the profession does not want to examine.

Law firms are now fluent in the language of inclusion. They can say “belonging” without flinching. They can form committees, populate panels, run initiatives, circulate internal updates and decorate the intranet with photographs of the newly visible. They can produce solemn statements about representation, opportunity, talent, allyship and fairness.

Some of this is good. Some of it is necessary. Some of it is long overdue.

Women were excluded from rooms. That happened. They were denied sponsorship. That happened. They were judged by different standards. That happened. Their ambition was treated as aggression. Their confidence was treated as arrogance. Their family lives were treated as liabilities. Their bodies, voices, clothes, pregnancies, absences and personalities were scrutinised in ways men did not have to navigate.

That history is real.

But history does not purify the present.

A corrective network is still a network. It still distributes access. It still creates loyalties. It still decides who is seen, who is encouraged, who is invited, who is protected and who hears about the opportunity before it becomes general knowledge.

Support can become infrastructure. Infrastructure can become influence. Influence can become power.

And power, once obtained, tends to behave like power.

There are now many professional groups with names along the lines of “Women in X”. Women in Law. Women in Property. Women in Construction. Women in Finance. Women in Leadership. Women in every sector where, for many years, the relevant rooms were built by and for men.

It is easy to understand why these groups exist. Many of them do valuable work. They create confidence, visibility, mentoring and solidarity in industries that were often very comfortable pretending the absence of women at the top was some mysterious accident of merit.

But they are still networks.

They still have chairs, committees, events, speakers, recommendations, introductions, friendships, reputations and informal lines of influence. They still allow people to gather, compare notes, develop strategy, exchange intelligence and pull one another into rooms.

That is not inherently wrong.

The problem is the moral innocence with which institutions pretend these networks are not also networks of advantage.

The old boys’ network was exclusionary. The new networks are called empowerment.

The old boys’ network was patronage. The new networks are support.

The old boys’ network was unfair. The new networks are progress.

Sometimes, all of that may be true.

Sometimes, it may not be the whole truth.

I once heard a senior figure involved in one such network offer younger women a piece of advice delivered with the cheerful pragmatism usually reserved for tax planning: if you have an advantage, use it; if men are foolish enough to respond to it, that is their problem.

Perhaps that is just worldly realism. Men have said worse things to each other for centuries, usually with less charm. No one needs to pretend male professional culture was a monastery of restraint.

But the remark stayed with me.

Not because it was shocking. It was almost the opposite. It was ordinary. Human. Practical. Slightly cynical. Entirely recognisable.

It revealed something that law firms are reluctant to admit: everyone understands advantage.

Everyone understands leverage.

Everyone understands the informal economy.

The question now is which forms of it are allowed to look virtuous.

That is the change I have watched.

Not the end of patronage. The rebranding of it.

In one firm I knew, leadership had changed materially in certain areas. Not symbolic power; actual power: team structures, internal initiatives, recruitment influence, access to work, access to clients, control over reputation and proximity to the rooms where careers are quietly made.

None of this, in itself, was a problem.

What was hard to ignore were the patterns around it.

Teams formed around senior figures, often reproducing their assumptions, loyalties and preferred forms of obedience. Opportunities seemed to move through channels that were never quite announced. Strategy groups, focus groups and internal initiatives appeared already populated before many people knew they existed.

These patterns were not neutral.

Women were often gathered in. Men were kept at a certain distance. Some men were tolerated if they were useful, quiet, compliant, technically strong or reassuringly unthreatening. Men with contrary views or independent judgment could find themselves treated less like colleagues and more like contaminants to be managed or avoided.

No policy said this.

No email announced it.

Patronage rarely appears in the minutes. It appears in the pattern: who gets copied in. Who gets asked. Who gets forgiven. Who gets interpreted sympathetically. Who gets invited for coffee. Who is assumed to have potential. Who is described as “one to watch”. Who is given context. Who is offered stretch work. Who is shielded when they stumble. Who is quietly helped to recover.

And who is left to stand outside the room, pretending not to notice that the meeting has already happened.

The profession has become very good at detecting certain kinds of imbalance and remarkably incurious about others.

If a male partner built a team overwhelmingly in his own image, favoured men who flattered him, excluded women from informal opportunities, handed strategy roles to the boys and treated dissenting women as difficult, law firms would know what to call it.

They have had the training.

They have the slides.

They have the vocabulary.

But when the pattern reverses, the vocabulary fails.

Suddenly it is not exclusion. It is support.

It is not favouritism. It is allyship.

It is not a clique. It is a network.

It is not patronage. It is progress.

The engine is the same. Only the signage has changed.

This is difficult to say, which is partly why it is worth saying.

A man who describes this aloud immediately becomes the thing the institution already suspects him of being: defensive, fragile, threatened, insensitive, resentful, obsolete. A relic with a login. A diversity training case study waiting to happen.

So he learns to speak in caveats.

He says, correctly, that historic exclusion was real.

He says, correctly, that women faced barriers men did not.

He says, correctly, that representation matters.

He says, correctly, that men have benefited from informal systems of advantage for generations.

He says all the necessary things, because they are true.

And then, having said them, he is still not allowed to describe the thing happening in front of him.

That is the neatest trick of the new order.

It has not abolished unfairness. It has created categories of unfairness that can be named and categories no one dares to name.

This does not mean women are the problem. That would be stupid, as well as false.

The problem is power protected from criticism because it has learned the language of virtue.

Power is not purified by the identity of the person holding it. It is purified, if at all, by restraint, transparency and accountability.

The test is not whether power is male or female. The test is whether it can be challenged.

A bully does not become less of a bully because she has endured bullying.

A clique does not become less of a clique because its members once stood outside another clique.

Favouritism does not become fairness because it has the right politics.

And a network does not stop being a network because the lanyards are nicer.

Some senior men were, and are, dreadful. Petty, vain, insecure, patronising, transactional, needy, tribal and addicted to their own reflection. The profession has always had men who confuse dominance with leadership and loyalty with competence.

But there is no reason to believe women in power are immune from the same contamination.

That is where things become toxic.

Not because diversity exists.

But because the language of diversity can become a shield.

Once power is morally protected, scrutiny becomes offensive. Criticism becomes insensitivity. Pattern recognition becomes prejudice. A request for fairness becomes fragility. The person naming the imbalance becomes the problem, because the imbalance itself is institutionally inconvenient.

And so the room learns the new etiquette.

Do not notice.

Do not ask why the same kinds of people are always invited.

Do not ask why certain juniors are given visibility and others are not.

Do not ask why “merit” appears to have become strangely selective.

Do not ask why some leaders can bully and still be called strong.

Do not ask why some people are described as direct, while others are described as difficult.

Do not ask why the old behaviours are unacceptable in one direction and enlightened in another.

Because the answer may be inconvenient.

The pendulum did need to swing. It had been stuck for a very long time. There were rooms women could not enter, assumptions they could not overcome, versions of authority they were punished for displaying, sacrifices they were expected to make quietly and indignities they were expected to absorb with a smile.

But a pendulum is not a moral instrument. It does not know fairness. It only knows motion.

Swinging too far in the opposite direction does not create equality. It creates a different unfairness, one harder to name because it travels under the banner of correction.

And correction without accountability makes poor architecture.

A fair profession would not require anyone to pretend the old system was harmless. It was not.

But it would also not require anyone to pretend the new system is incapable of harm.

It would be able to say two things at once: that women needed networks, and that networks require scrutiny once they become channels of power, whether internal or external.

It would be able to distinguish representation from favouritism.

It would be able to look at a team, a board, a committee, a focus group or a leadership pipeline and ask not only whether it photographs well, but whether it is fair.

Law firms are not very good at this.

They prefer language to reality. They prefer initiatives to examination. They prefer the appearance of moral progress to the harder work of ensuring that power, whoever holds it, is accountable.

That is why the old patterns survive.

They do not always wear the same clothes. They do not always speak with the same accent. They do not always gather in the same clubs or favour the same sons. But they still understand proximity. They still understand loyalty. They still understand who is safe, who is useful, who is inconvenient and who can be left outside.

This is the future I did not foresee in 2012. I thought the profession was trying, however imperfectly, to become fairer for everyone.

When that senior associate asked how it felt to be male and heading towards middle age in a law firm as the pendulum swung, I thought she was making a joke about demographics.

She was really describing a change in weather.

The profession was not automatically becoming fair for all. It was learning to describe unfairness differently.

The old networks had become embarrassing.

The new networks had become virtuous.

But the mechanism remained familiar: access, loyalty, sponsorship, proximity, protection, silence.

Law firms did not abolish privilege.

They diversified it.