Making sure you give back after achieving your goals is something we admire here at That Muslim Life. Sana Saddique, a qualified family law solicitor discusses with us her journey into achieving success in the legal field. We uncover her motivation and skills that led her to this path and also look into The Last Law – an organization she set up to help future lawyers break into the field. Join us in this interview to hear what family law is like, the skills needed to be successful, how you can get help from The Last Law as well as important lessons Sana wants everyone to know when they first start off their careers.
1) As a solicitor specialising in family law; what does your role entail and how did you decide this was the area you wanted to work in?
Working as a family law solicitor – it literally is dealing with people’s families. People often think it’s just divorce law but really family law is so broad in terms of what it covers. In fact, it’s probably one of the most broadest areas of law because it covers so many different aspects from divorce to financial separation. You’ve also got the children aspect, so where the parties have been married or unmarried, decisions on where the children are going to live, who’s going to have access to them? Will the grandparents have rights to see the children? These are all things which are covered within family law.
Family law also extends to adoption and surrogacy cases which is not something you’d think about in your average day to day life. But the reality is some families out there, those are the sorts of things they are going through, and that’s all encompassed within working as a family lawyer.
To answer how I got into this area, the earliest thing I can remember is when I joined a charity voluntary agency whilst studying and they offered support to people who couldn’t afford legal advice.
I found that a lot of the people coming through the doors were people that needed help with family related matters. I think that’s where I really connected with it because it had that feeling of people were literally at their most vulnerable point in their life.
So put money and access to the legal system aside, I asked myself what can I do to actually help these people? Because that’s their life, literally their home life, which is completely on the line. They’re going from office to office, constantly being told you have to pay this or you need this document and they don’t know one thing from the next. I think that’s what sparked my initial interest in it and what made me connect with this area.
2) Your role feels like an area where high emotions are often seen from clients. Is that important to understand and also what skills would you say are specific to family law?
Family law does require a very, very personal approach. So many people go into law thinking they want that corporate image and life of a lawyer from what they see on TV – everyone suited and booted with big salaries. In reality, they don’t actually see their clients face to face very often. Everything is done behind a team of people or just documents sent back and forth. However, with family law it’s very personal.
No one’s going to really open up to you about their marital issues or their home life issues if they can’t put a face to the name or if they don’t feel that they can trust you. That’s not going to build on anything for them to be able to get that help from you. For example, in domestic abuse cases, people aren’t going to come and turn to you for help if you’re not accessible. So that personal approach is really, really important within family law.
It’s also probably one of the hardest areas of law to get the balance right because you have to be trained and knowledgeable within the law. But you can’t get stuck behind this corporate image of I’m officially a solicitor and therefore I’m at top of the rank. It’s not an area where you’d be mingling with the clients. Getting that balance right is probably hardest within family law because you can’t get away with being too closed off. You have to have the skills and the experience for people to trust you, but also that friendly, impersonal approach that they want to talk to.
3) It sounds like you have to be a great listener, therapist, confidant but also maintain professionalism. Is that boundary easy to manage?
Definitely not. It’s so difficult to achieve that because again, when people are talking about their home life, it’s so easy for them to digress and just start talking to you about personal issues and opinions. We’re not really trained or qualified or in a position to give them that guidance and the most you can do is listen but then steer them back on track.
I’ve personally found a system where I always offer a free initial consultation wherever I work. It allows the client to really offload and say anything that they want to talk to you about and you’re not charging them.
The reality is I can’t give them counselling or therapy, but they will feel better just to know someone listened to them. Sometimes to help the client if you have relevant contacts is to refer them to particular people or companies e.g. for mediation.
Once they have that initial consultation and they’ve got everything off their chest, I can then say “right, now we need to focus on the legal aspects of it”. This is the way I sort of bring it back on topic and direct them out elsewhere if they need to talk further about those personal issues which don’t actually fall under my legal expertise.
4) I’m guessing you didn’t cover all this in your degree!
No, that’s the problem. You don’t actually know what you’re getting into until you actually start doing the job. It’s so different from simply reading what the law says in a textbook.
5) You’ve mashAllah received several legal awards and nominations. Could you go over some of them so the readers know what it takes to be recognized for one?
The award season normally takes places every October to December and there’s about 15 award ceremonies across the period. They awards vary with some of the categorises being Best Student Within Law, Best Tech Innovator, to the Best Partner Promoting Diversity/Inclusion. There’s so many different awards out there and they’re all regulated and governed by the Law Society.
The two awards that I was involved with was Professional of the Year, which I was a finalist for. It was a nomination from one of the students I was mentoring through my The Last Law platform.
She was a Canadian student who had come to the UK and was really struggling to adjust to life here and the legal system set up. She had a very prominent position back in Canada, but it’s difficult to translate that into a new country. You can have a big title in one country, but you come to the UK and you’ve got to go through all these conversion routes and so on. So it was guiding her right from the bottom, really, in terms of how you get your foot on the ladder first and then getting back to get to those similar positions here in the UK.
Another award I was part of was for Individuals Showing Excellence in Law. So it’s quite a broad general title in that sense, but again, it was a nomination from one of my colleagues from my last job. The award nomination factored in the variety of work that I did outside of the law firm. So this was my work within the community, as well as to progress and promote change within law firms.
“They might have two hours before their partner comes back and they’re trying to rush to get through things. You can’t really say to them, “I’m kind of busy at the moment so I’ll call you back”.
6) Back to your day to day role, what’s a day in the life of a solicitor like?
Well, the first thing is your day never goes to plan. It absolutely never will go to plan! So I always have a routine where at the end of each day I’ll make a list of the urgent things I need to do the following morning – whether it relates to a deadline or calling a client back, which I didn’t
get to do on that particular day. But by the time the morning comes, you’ll have ten other urgent issues which pop up or ten other cases where suddenly things have gone a bit wrong and the judges are calling you and you’ve got an urgent court hearing. Family law is definitely an area of law where things happened very last minute.
So you could be working on one case when you suddenly get a call from the court saying they’re listing an urgent hearing on a particular matter. You literally will have to drop all your appointments, drop everything you’re working on if you’re a court advocate.
If you’re a solicitor who focuses just on doing the solicitor work, you’re based in the office. In that instance you’ll have a barrister which you’ll contact and inform them a hearing has come through and they’ll need to get to court. In some cases I’ve covered both sides, so I have to then juggle the office and rushing off to court.
But the general day is working on drafting statements for clients and dealing with new enquiries.
New contacts will call the office or to you directly saying that they’ve come across your details and they’re struggling with a particular issue. It might be about them not having seen their children in such a number of years or that they’re in an abusive relationship and they don’t know what to do. In the latter example, they might have two hours before their partner comes back and they’re trying to rush to get through things. You can’t really say to them, “I’m kind of busy at the moment so I’ll call you back”… so it’s a very time sensitive area of work, which is partly why nothing will go to plan. So it’s very intense in that way, but it’s so varied in terms of what you’re doing day to day.
7) How does a solicitor’s job change with experience?
When you start off as a junior qualified solicitor, the bulk of your work will be speaking with the clients and drafting the case documents. As you progress in terms of experience and you progress up the chain, you get more management job roles. Unfortunately, it comes at a cost because you do have to still juggle both sides. You will be dealing with the clients and the court side, drafting all the paperwork and also training the next junior lawyers or paralegals who are trying to qualify as solicitors.
The workload tends to then expand so much, but it covers a different skill element entirely. It’s stepping away from the legal side, and it’s more about the business and management side of things. It’s varied in that sense and it’s something which if you have an interest in happily choose to pursue that.
For many people, they’re not interested in the business side, so they avoid the management positions. Some people choose to qualify as solicitors or barristers purely for the law, which makes sense. So if you’re not interested in the workings and functioning of a business, how it all runs behind the scenes, you’re not going to want to progress to those management positions. At those levels you’re then responsible for calculating the cash flow and how much money you’re making on top of actually doing everything else. So it’s a very particular route to follow if you’re interested in it.
8) You’ve mentioned your organisation The Last Law and the sort of work its done. Can you let us know more about what the organization stands for and why you found it?
Of course. So with The Last Law, it was initially set up just to mentor students from university level and to show them all the options. I found it important to provide for these students someone who can guide and mentor them. That’s something which stemmed from the fact that I never had that when I was in that position.
My parents are pharmacists and so I was pushed towards the scientific roots by teachers, but I actually was so terrible at science subjects! It was insane! It was very obvious to me that wasn’t my natural line of work and that wasn’t going to be the route I should be following. I always found that if I had just one person at that time who was able to show me a different route and how it can be done, I’d be able to look into other options earlier. Whether that person be somebody who’s Asian, Muslim, a woman, wears a scarf or whatever it might be – you can see that there is that person out there and it gives you that hope to believe that it can be achieved.
Those are all things which I struggled to find when I was back in my studying times because I think things were still very, very different. I don’t actually recall seeing even any Asian lawyers, let alone any Asian female lawyer. So it was very, very cut off and isolated in that sense. But now it’s it’s a growing market. It’s definitely becoming more diverse.
There’s definitely more Asians and females as well within the legal field. But if we don’t then connect with the next generation of lawyers, they will realize that it’s an inaccessible profession because they’re still being told you can’t break into that. So the aim behind the last law was really to be that mentor, to be that person that people can connect with. Whether they’ve just got an odd question that they want to ask just or guidance and mentoring on a particular topic. Examples of how the Last Law has helped people in the past are answering questions such as what types of law firms should I be applying to or what can I do whilst I’m still at school or college or university, to help break into this profession. So that’s where it all started from.
9) Is The Last Law aimed mostly at college level?
When I first started Last Law it was aimed at secondary school and college level. But what I found was it was more of the university level which were reaching out to me. As students they had ignored what the teachers were saying at school and they adamantly wanted to study law. They just pushed forward with that and undertook law at university- however they didn’t know what to do next and how to translate that into role at a law firm. So I still offer the mentoring to any students at school and college level but the bulk of them actually tend to be university and graduate level.
10) Raffia Arshad was recently appointed as the first hijab-wearing UK court judge. Do you feel a lot of barriers have now been broken or is there still more work to do?
I think there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done to be honest in the legal profession, it still is very English, elitist, and male dominated. The appointment of Raffia as a judge, it’s definitely a massive turning point and a stepping stone. But I don’t feel it’s the end of those barriers. I think there’s still a lot that will need to be broken down and to make things much more accessible. But it’s definitely a massive step because you do see many females on in the legal profession now, but you still don’t see them in those higher level positions.
Many are still at the level where they’re just qualified solicitors, but they’re not as common in the management or judge level. So for her to get to that top level, it’s definitely a massive turning point. But then it’s again making sure that change is sustained, that she lasts within that position and that there are more people which also follow through to this high level position. So it doesn’t just stop with just one person.
11) What lessons did you learn early on in your career or realised you should’ve done differently? Secondly, how have you managed practicing being a Muslim at work?
When you’re actually working within law, you’re always until you’re qualified quite protected because you’re still training. Your senior will ultimately take the fall if you’ve made a mistake because their job is to check the work that you’re doing, so you’ve always got that safety net. But I think the biggest difficulty is finding the balance between being who you are yourself and who you feel you have to be at work because there’s always a difference.
You can have your own personality, your own principles, and then when you go into what your workplace and environment is set up in a particular way, whether it’s by the age group or the gender of people who run that particular company, and you don’t always feel that you can comfortably be yourself. But I think one of the biggest things I’ve learned is that it’s more important to just make sure you yourself because you can only change and adapt so much before you lose your own identity.
When it comes to religion, you shouldn’t be in a work environment where you feel you have to hide the fact your commitments e.g. wanting to pray. You’ll always find firms and some bosses who will make a problem out of these things. That’s where it’s important to figure out who do you want to be? So who do you want to be in terms of balancing your principles and your faith with your professional duties because you can’t have only one aspect. Life is never always about one thing, so you can’t just be the lawyer and forget everything else in life. But likewise, you can’t just be on a Muslim or a devout Christian or whatever it might be.
It’s about finding a way to to make that balance. How do you juggle both aspects? You just need to be forward thinking about how to go about it. The reality is you need to be able to create that setting where you don’t have to make an excuse. You can literally just say, “I have a need to go and pray. This is roughly how long I’ll take and then I’ll be back and I’ll catch up with everything”.
If that environment isn’t there already, it might just be because they’ve not come across people that need it. So that duty then is on you to make that change because it’s not always someone else’s problem. It’s not that they’re always being difficult. They might be completely clueless about these things. So it’s something you have to open the dialogue about to make people aware and then to create that change.
12) Lastly, how have you defined success in your career?
Uhm…That’s a really deep question actually! I think for me, it’s never been about the monetary value because there’s probably a lot of other jobs you could do which would pay equally, if not more than the legal profession. It’s not actually as well-paid as people think from what they see on TV. You’ll get some firms which do pay colossal amounts, but the reality is you’re then working on contracts where you’ve got to go in any time of the day or night when when your bosses call you, even if that’s 2 or 3 in the morning. So if you want that level of salary, it’s always at a price. For some people, it might be based more on titles such becoming a managing partner or a director. Those are things even I aspire for but that’s not what I would define as success personally.
For me the legal profession was never really based on salary. It was more about the personal fact of what you’re going to gain from it. Success for me is more about do I feel that the clients or the people I’ve worked with have actually been positively impacted because they found me as a lawyer opposed to potentially finding somebody else. What change and difference have I been able to make in their life? And for me, that’s what the success element would be defined as.
13) Final Four
14) LinkedIn Profile
