I knew I wanted to become a lawyer early on in my life – but went to study English literature as I loved it. At the time, I knew law firms recruited non-law grads and I anticipated that the transferable skills from English would feed into my legal work, which they have.

I come from a black African family, if you are not a doctor, you’re a lawyer. If you’re not a lawyer you’re an engineer. It was what I felt was the best path for me and put my skills to work – I was involved in the debating society and loved a good argument/debate.

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I knew there would be challenges, but thought the barriers were something everybody faced. The real test began when I tried to get a training contract.

In terms of challenges – I would say there are barriers to entry. I think a lot of working-class students, who are the first to go to university and are in schools that aren’t performing so well, face the biggest challenges.

I went to an academy in east London and it was hard to find someone in the legal industry until I expressed the interest at sixth form and my tutor helped me get an internship at Stewarts Law. I had never stepped into a legal atmosphere let alone a corporate one.

That’s when I decided that it is what I wanted to do. Had I not had a supportive teacher who spoke to someone on the board of trustees it would have been hard to get on the ladder. I joined a lot of initiatives to help young black Muslim working-class women, who want to go into the legal industry or any form of higher education.

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Retention is a major issue in the industry, especially for young black women solicitors as a lot of the time you aren’t working with people that look like you and you don’t know if it is a place that you can occupy.

Representation is something that is important. Ensuring once you have these bright diverse lawyers through the door, you have to think about retaining them. When I got my training contract I co-founded the law collective, which started off as a WhatsApp group and now has over 200 black lawyer members