A lawyer who once struggled to speak and make a simple sentence for fear of embarrassing himself has expressed pride at playing a role in a charity partnership between leading law firm Clarke Willmott LLP and the Social Mobility Foundation (SMF).

Ryan Rahim, a solicitor at Clarke Willmott, along with IT trainer Tom Costin, told the podcast Life, Lemons, and the Law that he welcomed the firm’s new community strategy to improve social mobility within the sector.

Clarke Willmott is working with SMF as its national partner to level the playing field for students with the ability and ambition to flourish academically and in the world of work, but who lack the opportunities and networks to help them get there.

Ryan, who works as a solicitor for Clarke Willmott’s Business Recovery Unit, talks of how his background and disabilities (dyslexia, ADHD, and dyspraxia) have impacted his legal career, and took him 17 years to qualify as a lawyer.

“I didn’t speak until I was six or seven – I often muddled up my words and was quite embarrassed and refused to speak – luckily a kind tutor realised I needed a quiet place to learn. Without him I probably wouldn’t have been able to finish primary school.”

Ryan came to the UK as an international student with the dream of working as a lawyer but says his continuing language processing difficulties and the cost of financing law school felt like an insurmountable challenge.

“Luckily, everything changed when I was on my Legal Practice course and met a trainee solicitor at a networking event who gave me the connection and created the opportunity for me to do a week’s work experience at Clarke Willmott in Bristol,” added Ryan.

“I was supported by one of the firm’s most senior partners. She knew I didn’t have any work experience, but she greeted me with the biggest smile. She was brilliant. I was so grateful for her trust in me and the chance to get such a valuable insight into a large commercial firm.

“Though between 2016 and 2020 I worked for other firms, I knew which kind of firm I eventually wanted to settle at, and Clarke Willmott was at the top of my list. I joined as a paralegal in 2020 and qualified as a solicitor in November last year.

“Language is at the heart of social mobility, and young people like me from different backgrounds and different countries should be given an opportunity and also depart from the damaging idea that there is one single, right form of language, and not to be guided by prejudice.”

Tom Costin, who found it difficult to concentrate in class, and left school without taking his A Levels after his parents’ marriage broke down, now works in Clarke Willmott’s Bristol office as an IT trainer, but says like Ryan, his ultimate dream is to qualify as a solicitor.

“It’s starting to build the contacts, building the understanding of how I can get there and then to scale that up in my mind,” said Tom. “It’s still this insurmountable wall, this mountain that’s ahead of me, that maybe one day I’ll get there.

“At school I was told the law wasn’t for someone from my kind of background. That message has stuck with me for the last 16-17 years and has been so disabling. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to get so heavily involved with the Social Mobility Foundation.”

Tom says he’s keen to work with other people who are experiencing similar barriers.

“It shouldn’t matter who you are or what you are able to do, support needs to be better, especially in education. My secondary school was not in a wealthy area and did its best to kick it out of me that I wasn’t going to enter a career that I really wanted to.

“It wasn’t until I started getting involved in the Foundation and speaking with people like Ryan and with some of the people who work here at Clarke Willmott that I suddenly started to realise that I might be able to find my way into the profession.”

Clarke Willmott will be supporting the Social Mobility Foundation over the course of the next year.

Life, Lemons and the Law is Clarke Willmott’s podcast series featuring lawyers from across the firm’s seven regional offices in Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, London, Manchester, Southampton and Taunton.