International law firm Simmons & Simmons has been named a Top 75 employer in The Social Mobility Foundation Employer Index in 2025.
The firm was included in the ranking for the fifth year running – and this year was ranked 28th.
The Social Mobility Employer Index is an annual benchmarking tool by the Social Mobility Foundation. It evaluates businesses across eight key areas, including outreach to young people, recruitment and selection, career progression, and workplace culture, to measure their success in making workplaces open to talent from all social backgrounds.
Simmons runs several programmes to support young people and provide opportunities at the firm, including its Young Talent Programme, Brampton Future Lawyers Programme and Solicitors Apprenticeship Programme.
The firm also supports a range of external initiatives, such as 10,000 Black Interns and Big City Bright Future. Internally, the firm continues to run multiple social mobility initiatives, including a mentoring programme and regular campaigns through its Social Mobility Network.
In February 2025, Simmons published new targets to improve diversity by socio-economic background in the firm’s UK offices – becoming one of only a few of the large firms to publicly disclose their social mobility targets.
The firm will aim to improve its UK representation by ensuring that by 2029, a minimum of 20% of employees across a range of roles will come from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
These targets are in addition to those which seek to improve the representation of women and those from ethnic minority backgrounds.
Earlier this week, Simmons was also recognised as a top five law firm for its responsible business practices.
Julian Taylor, Senior Partner, said: “We’ve been working hard across the firm to ensure that we build a genuinely inclusive environment, where success at Simmons is determined by talent, not background. To secure this recognition for the fifth year running reflects those immense efforts. Since last year, we have set new targets to improve representation of those from lower socio-economic backgrounds; I’m proud of these ambitious goals, we will do all we can to meet them.”
