Jo Farmer, Managing Partner of Lewis Silkin
Meet Jo Farmer, Joint Managing Partner at Lewis Silkin, a law firm known for doing things differently and championing the ideas and people shaping modern business. With deep roots in advertising and media law and a career spent at the heart of the creative industries, Jo brings a practical, people-first perspective to leading a firm that thrives on innovation and change.
We caught up with Jo to discuss building a truly tech-enabled law firm, embedding AI across the whole organisation, and why challenging traditional expectations, both in how law is practised and how lawyers live and work, is key to creating a more inclusive and sustainable future.
Photo: Jo Farmer
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your background?
My background isn’t typical. I come from a working-class family. I was raised by a single, teenage mother in a council house, and was the first in my family to go to university. I saw law as a profession that offered stability and security, and I qualified in 1999 at Edge Ellison (now Squire Patton Boggs), specialising in advertising and media law. After getting married, I spent a couple of years travelling in the early noughties before coming back and running towards Lewis Silkin, which I regarded as the Premier League of law firms in the creative sectors, as well as being a genuinely lovely place to work. I’m pleased to say that hasn’t changed. The firm’s place at the forefront of creative industries and technology, together with our ethos of ‘bravery and kindness’, has kept me here. Now, as Joint Managing Partner and current custodian of the firm’s future strategic success, it is something I hold very dear.
There's been real progress on gender diversity, but change can feel uneven across the industry. Where do you think law firms still need to be more honest with themselves?
A great deal of progress has been made, including at Lewis Silkin. For example, we want 45% of our partners to be women by 2027, and we are on target for that. The opportunities for bringing about real change on gender diversity are all there. But our industry still struggles to retain women all the way through to senior leadership positions. I am increasingly persuaded that much of this comes down to unrealistic expectations about working family lives, and I feel it is part of my role to keep asking questions that shift expectations about what it looks like to be a working mother in the legal sector.
Challenging traditional parenting roles is essential. Better paternity leave (ideally equal paid parental leave, like we have at Lewis Silkin) is part of it, as well as people like me talking openly about the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to parenting. I tell people often that I don’t live an Instagram-perfect life. I order a lot of Deliveroo, I never iron, and I either outsource what I can or simply live with the messiness at home. I’m always happy to share that unvarnished reality if it helps other working parents!
As an industry, I think we need to continue challenging ourselves not to return to presenteeism or an “always on” culture, because that is one of the perfectionist myths most lawyers carry, and it has a particular tendency to hold women back when they have young children. In reality, your career isn’t a straight-line sprint sustained over decades – there are peaks and troughs, and that is more than okay.
Where do you see the biggest disconnect today between how firms price AI-enabled legal work and how clients perceive its value?
I think we are still only just beginning to work things out. We have clients who want us to use AI and deliver a cost saving, but the key is understanding what their parameters and tolerance for risk are, particularly in relation to AI errors. Transparency is everything: being clear about when you have used AI, and how the output has been reviewed and checked.
Clients naturally expect the use of AI to drive down price on certain types of work, particularly those involving the distillation of large volumes of information. But when the stakes and the risks are high, clients still want an expert human with good judgement.
