Gender Pay Gap Report 2025
At Knights we have a one team ethos which is based on principles of fairness, openness and trust and performed through a corporate structure enabling all of our people to fulfil their potential on an equal footing.
We are committed to ensuring that our colleagues have freedom and choice when setting their career path by, amongst other things, facilitating career changes within the business when opportunities arise.
Our business model is attractive to commercially minded professionals as a result of our merit-based approach to reward and progression and we have an established Leadership Team, with a broad experience base including beyond the legal sector, dedicated to running the business, releasing professionals to focus on client service delivery.
Our structure remains unusual within the legal sector which is otherwise dominated by firms operating under a Partnership structure. As a consequence, the dataset upon which our report is based is very different from other businesses in the sector in that, unlike theirs, ours includes the remuneration of all Partners, Directors and Board members (except non-executive Board members).
In the 12 months prior to 5 April 2025 (‘Snapshot Date’) we acquired two law firms. Our dataset includes the details of all those who joined us through acquisition within the reporting period unless otherwise specified.
The information provided in our report therefore captures clearly and comprehensively our gender pay gap and the analysis demonstrates our commitment to our principles in all parts of our business.
By law, men and women must receive equal pay for the same, or broadly similar, work; work rated as equivalent under a job evaluation scheme or work of equal value.
We have a clear policy of paying our colleagues equally for the same or equivalent work.
Our median gender pay gap has reduced from 32% to 25% since our 2024 report. Our mean gender pay gap has also reduced from 36% to 33% since the 2024 report, and both have steadily reduced since we began reporting in 2017. In line with statistical commentary, we consider that our median figures are more statistically representative of our Gender Pay Gap than our mean figures.
Since our first report in 2017, we have seen a significant reduction (20%) in our median gender pay gap which has reduced from 45% to 25% this year. We are actively committed to ensuring that our colleagues are paid fairly for the work that they do and this change reflects that commitment. We are confident that our gender pay gap reflects the types of roles within our business that are predominantly undertaken by females alongside historic barriers to access to the legal profession for women. The practical impact of this is that there are fewer highly experienced female lawyers than male in the sector generally and that is reflected in our business.
We are proud of our commitment to fairness and equality to all of our colleagues and we are continuing to make significant progress in eroding historical gender pay gaps as shown by our promotions during the reporting period of which 66% were female and, of those promoted to Partner or Senior Associate, 85% were female. We continue to promote on merit alone rather than tenure or other factors which has resulted in a greater proportion of promotions for female colleagues as compared to male across the board.
We have continued to complete a more detailed analysis of the pay gap by reference to job group and found that our pay gap is most significant within our Partner group. Of those Partners with a professional qualification (noting that we employ non-legal professionals alongside our lawyers) post-qualification experience (PQE) ranges significantly, from 0 to 45 years.
As a result of the overall historical barriers to females entering the profession generally, the gap within this group is entirely expected, with some recently promoted to Partner, and others having been in the position for a decade or more.
We also reviewed the quartile into which our Partners fell for their hourly pay, comparing this with their number of years PQE and associated hourly charge out rate. The comparison showed a direct correlation between an individual’s experience, charge out rate, and hourly pay.
As expected, based on the demographics of the legal profession as a whole, we have a greater proportion of male colleagues with more PQE within this group and, although there are exceptions to this, it is reasonable to expect that those with more experience will, generally speaking, have a higher hourly rate of pay. While this data is assuring, we are not complacent, and we will continue to analyse our pay data by reference to job group as a check that decisions around remuneration continue to be made fairly and without any reference to gender.
We also remain committed to being a family friendly employer, matching the pay available for those on maternity leave and shared parental leave, and accommodating a wide variety of flexible working arrangements, with 22% of our workforce working part time in the reporting period (up from 20% last year).
While it remains the case that a greater proportion of women in our business work part time, we seek to ensure that, when pro-rated, pay is the same as those working full time.
As is clear from the charts below, a greater number of female colleagues have been promoted than male colleagues in Client Services roles.
We take care in ensuring fairness in reviewing remuneration across our business. As we do not use financial targets, pay increases are awarded based on merit, taking into account the person’s overall contribution to our business. Feedback from our colleagues has been consistently in favour of salary reviews to reflect performance rather than using set objective criteria or pay grades. Colleagues are invited to raise questions around any decisions about remuneration without fear of reproach, and we pride ourselves on our transparent and even-handed approach to remuneration across our business.
This is further supported by an objective review of salaries and a separate equivalence review. When acquiring other businesses, we take particular care when reviewing the salaries offered, and we seek to adjust where appropriate to ensure that colleagues are rewarded appropriately for the work they do, their contribution and taking into account market rates where relevant. This process generally takes place in the 12 months following an acquisition to ensure that a fair assessment can be made of each person and to ensure that this is not skewed by tenure or other factors.
As a general rule, we do not pay bonuses as we consider this to be counter-cultural aligning to individual performance rather than our strong team culture. As a result, we pay a higher non-discretionary salary. Where a contractual right to a bonus is inherited through acquisition of another business, wherever possible, we seek to buy this out and incorporate that into their new non-discretionary salary. We do have an incentive scheme for the introduction of new colleagues which is available only to those not in positions of management or leadership.
Statistics in this section were calculated by reference to our population of relevant employees as defined by the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017 (Relevant Employees).
Overall, inclusive of bonus payments and referral fees earned, 3% of male and 1.6% of female colleagues received a bonus or referral fee in the reporting period, together representing 0.02% of our Relevant Employees population.
Bonus payments within the reporting period relate almost entirely to colleague referral fees with only three payments being made in the reporting year. Two of these were legacy bonuses related to acquisitions and the third to a self-employed consultant being commission related. This delivers a median bonus gap of 62.5% and a mean bonus gap of 66% which, due to the small data set the results are not considered to be representative of our approach to the award of performance related bonus payments. Bonus Payments accounted for 0.33% of our total wages and salary costs for the financial year ending 30 April 2025 (figure taken from our Annual Report for the financial year ending 30 April 2025).
