Judith Dorkins

Judith has been a Solicitor for well over 20 years initially specialising in serious and catastrophic personal injury work but has spent more than half that time leading and managing legal teams. After training at Howes Percival in Northampton and reaching Associate status she moved to Shoosmiths in 1992 where she remained for almost 20 years. As an Equity Partner in the firm she took on a variety of management roles and sat on the Executive Board of the whole business. One of her great delights was to lead the development of the award winning Corporate Social Responsibility offering at Shoosmiths Judith designed and delivered the re-engineering of the Consumer legal business at Shoosmiths, a division with turnover of its own in excess of all but the top 60 law firms. Following a root and branch strategic review, Judith went on to develop the new Access Legal consumer brand in response to the challenges created by the changing legal market. Her work has regularly required the design and implementation of process change to retain profitability in cost-sensitive markets without damaging staff enthusiasm. More recently as Deputy CEO, she has been leading a fundamental change programme in Tees Law designed to place the client and their journey firmly at the centre of the business to deliver a true differentiation from competitors. Judith is a Partner in Pathways Management LLP, a business providing management services to the legal sector. She and fellow Partner, Paul Stothard, use their combined experience of law firm management to help firms across the sector to deliver business improvement whether through people development, strategic and structural change, risk management or brand service and process enhancement. She is described as "someone who can take on responsibility for enormous change programmes within a business and carry them out with humour, vision and focus'